‘Apocalyptic’: B.C. family escapes Pear Lake wildfire but loses nearly everything
Posted July 29, 2026 1:34 pm.
Last Updated July 29, 2026 2:00 pm.
These were the tense moments Steve Larabie recorded as he tried desperately to fire-proof his property against the incoming Pear Lake wildfire.
“So here you guys are, I just got off my excavator, I tried to make a fire break, I did the best I can,” said Larabie in his recording.
“This might be the end of Steve’s Towing. We might lose everything.”
“It sounded like two 747s, jets, landing behind my house; it was so loud, the decibels,” remembers Larabie.
For Larabie’s partner, Crystal Smith, the sound was something out of a movie.
“The wind was just apocalyptic; it was almost like there was a tornado.”
What came next was a frantic evacuation. As Larabie’s family and friends rushed to get his heavy-duty tow trucks out of harm’s way, the fire roared closer, and Larabie realized some precious items were still inside; namely, his cat and the ashes of his brother and his daughter.
“So everybody already left, and I ran back into the house, and the power wasn’t on so I had to find my phone, and when I came back out the door, the fire was literally on the other side of my gate of my junkyard, and it was so intense that I could smell the paint on my tow truck starting to bubble and melt as I took off out the driveway,” said Larabie
“As we started going down the road coming towards Cache Creek, the fire was ahead of us now, it was behind us and ahead of us. And it was burning down both sides of the highway. And it became extremely violent. We had no other choice but to go.”
Larabie escaped by the skin of his teeth, but everything that was left behind, from heavy equipment to vintage cars, antiques, his entire wreckage yard, his house and his daughter’s house, was left unrecognizable in a matter of hours.
Larabie says he’s lost more than $10 million worth of possessions and he’s incensed because he feels as though the province left him out to dry.
“It’s not fair, and the government has to be accountable for this one. They need to rebuild my home, my neighbour’s home, my other home, and replace everything I lost for negligence of their responsibility. Their job is to make sure they save our homes. They didn’t do that. They dropped the ball, again.”
Smith says they have been able to get support, but it’s been from closer to home.
Donations from the locals they’ve helped out over the years, as well as the towing community, have allowed them to start planning how they’re going to rebuild.
“You can’t hang your head when there’s so many people trying to hold it up,” said Smith.
