Several people worked together to extinguish the fires. A group of motorists helped put out two fires in the Joe Rich area Friday night, preventing them from spreading to a nearby home. Nelson resident Josh Georgetti was driving home from Kelowna along Highway 33 about 6:30 p.m. when he encountered two separate fires on either side of the road, just west of the Joe Rich Fire Hall. “It was like someone threw a cigarette butt … like it came out of the passenger side, one of the drivers,” Giorgetti said. He stopped to help put out the fires, along with a handful of others who were passing by at the time. Giorgetti says about 10 or 15 people ended up helping put out the fires. “You see smoke in August and it’s definitely not a good sign,” he said. “We all pulled. I had rakes in the back of my jeep and some people had pieces of 2x4s and 2x8s and people had water bottles. It was pretty crazy, but we did it.” Giorgetti says the fire he was working on was about 15 feet by 15 feet, while the one across the street may have been even larger. He says they had it all down in about 15 minutes before the Joe Rich Fire Department showed up. “It was definitely too big, it was packed. If no one had stopped, this house probably would have been gone, it would have been very bad,” Georgetti said. “You could see it went off the freeway and into the tall grass.” Once residents of the nearby home noticed the flames, Giorgetti said they ran outside with a hose to help put out the hot spots. While this year’s fire season has been somewhat tame so far compared to previous years, the province saw an uptick in new fires last week with 76 new fires ignited in the past two days alone. Georgetti was visiting his girlfriend Emma at Kelowna General Hospital, where she had been staying for the past three and a half weeks. Emma, who is 34 weeks pregnant, was seriously injured in a bike accident last month and was airlifted from Nelson to Kelowna. The couple’s family has set up a GoFundMe page to help with her medical and related expenses.
