If only we could send some of the extraneous -- and there has been far more than enough this spring and summer here -- rain that has distinguished this year as the wettest on record for the Ottawa Valley along to the interior of British Columbia, it would surely do more good there than it has here.

That excessive rain has caused flooding here, requiring people to be evacuated where their homes have been directly in the line of storm-caused floods, and some evacuations closer to home when the hillside beyond our street began collapsing into the ravine below.

Remediation is ongoing, but the people affected will always view the nightmare they had undergone as a horrible memory that they would prefer not to recall, but are helpless not to. And so it must be for the people who have been evacuated from the interior of British Columbia as a result of wildfires in their hundreds threatening their homes.

Where we had excessive rainfall, and continue to, they've experienced drought conditions that began last fall, into the winter and throughout the spring, perfect tinder for spontaneous combustion such as lightning strikes to light into instant conflagrations feeding on parched grasslands and dried-up tumbleweed, extending into the forests, drier than usual from an unusual weather pattern.

So we think about the people at 100-mile House, Cache Creek, Ashcroft and Williams Lake, who have been forced by circumstances quite beyond control to leave their homes, their possessions, their security and what must seem to them to be their futures, to find haven elsewhere from the fires encroaching upon their towns and villages.

And we think of their gratitude to the firefighters, volunteer and professional, local and those from away, who have come out in their thousands to try to manage the fires as best practise leads them to, in hopes that their skills and experience will result in buildings and homes and civil infrastructure being saved, as much as possible. The technicians that are struggling in their professional capacity to restore power to habitation have no easy task.

People who love nature and their heritage traditions find huge value in living directly within the bosom of nature. Eventually catastrophic floods or wildfires spring up to threaten lives and possessions and dreams of living in harmony with natural surroundings.