What Happened

On the afternoon of August 7, 2026, Carmen stepped outside her home and smelled a different quality of smoke.

Less than two years earlier, she and her husband Ruben had moved back to Ruben’s rural childhood home outside Summerland, BC to help support his aging parents. It was their dream to move to the country; they were small-scale city farmers for decades, saving up for this goal.

When Ruben’s parents’ health took a downturn, they decided the family homestead (fondly known as Faulder Farm) was the best move for them to start their new life chapter – which meant starting from scratch on raw land in a corner of the acreage. After the move, Carmen began rescuing wild horses at the local auction, Ruben built infrastructure for their home and improved the commercial garlic farm, and they grew a large garden and raised animals.

The Okanagan is wildfire country, and they could smell smoke on most days in late summer.

But this was different.

Seven kilometres from their land, a spark grew rapidly into the massive Bald Range Wildfire – one of BC’s most ferocious wildfires of 2026.

Black smoke rolled in currents over the hills toward their land. Carmen and Ruben had an evacuation protocol in place, but only had only minutes to enact their emergency plan.

Carmen packed her mother and father-in-law and her young-adult child into the family car with a bag of provisions for each, and the family’s cats. She gave her sheep and pigs extra food and water, dragged the irrigation to their mobile shelter to keep them as safe as possible, and then released her horses to run on their own (there was no time to pack panicking animals into transport).

Ruben turned on the PTO water pump he had installed earlier this year. There is no fire department or fire insurance for their unincorporated community of Faulder: rural residents need to fend for themselves. The PTO pump takes water from the creek and to a fire hose, protecting buildings and animals. It needs to be manually operated, so Ruben stayed behind while Carmen and family sped down the gravel road to the nearby town of Summerland, driving right through the fire with flames on both sides of their driveway and down the road.

The Damage

After several hours of drenching their property with water, the fire was too big and too hot. The pump ran out of fuel, the embers were landing everywhere. Ruben fled to a nearby low creek and stayed under a bridge for protection for the entire night.

He watched and listened as the fire destroyed everything:

The only structure to survive is a 10x10 mobile animal barn parked in an irrigated field, and (miraculously) a chicken coop.

In early September 2026, Carmen and Ruben were allowed to return to their home once for a one-hour escorted viewing to understand the extent of the damage. They found that unfortunately their 7 young piglets and a lamb were predated on by coyotes and did not survive. The remaining four pigs have been boarded at their prior home, and the surviving lamb has returned to her home flock. Thankfully all the horses survived. They followed the creek to a nearby farm and herded up with another group of neighbour horses. They will be boarded until Carmen and Ruben can bring them back to Faulder Farm.

What This Means

Carmen and Ruben have nowhere else to go. Ruben’s family has been living on the land since before there was a telephone line. They put their life savings into moving to the Okanogan to support his parents’ aging-in-place and her child’s dynamic disabilities. These two generations still need daily care.

There is no choice but to clean up – and rebuild.

They have made the decision to return to the land as soon as they are allowed to.

Once there, Carmen will continue running her online businesses that support the family. Ruben will build ad-hoc infrastructure. They will clean up what the fire has destroyed and plant crops again.

Carmen and Ruben will rebuild on a smaller scale, with structures easier to defend and more mobile if repeat evacuations are needed.

If you’d like to get to know Carmen and Ruben directly and hear how they plan to rebuild, watch their interview on CBC National here

What your Donation will help Support

Here are some items and actions that your donation will directly provide:

Where to go for more information

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[here is the information shared on August 7th when this fundraiser was created]

Hello dear reader,

With a heavy heart I must announce that Carmen Spagnola's home has been lost to wildfire today Friday August 7th. Carmen lives on a rural farm in BC's Okanagan with her beloved husband Ruben, her adult child, and her elderly in-laws.

They have lost all of their belongings to the fire which is still burning.

Anything you can contribute to support will go directly to them. We will share more updates as they come in.