Five Years, Twenty Homes: What Actually Slows a Wildfire Rebuild

Building a house takes eight to twelve months. After a wildfire in British Columbia, families have been waiting three to five years to move back in. The difference is not construction. It is everything that has to happen before anyone is allowed to start.

We went through the permit records and recovery dashboards from the three most recent major fires in BC and Alberta. One of those fires crossed a jurisdictional boundary, which produced the closest thing this country has to a controlled test of how much the governing body matters. Every figure below is sourced at the foot of the page.

The record

Lytton burned on June 30, 2021. Five years later, 20 homes have been rebuilt and are occupied, with around 75 people returned.² The pace has picked up. There were five occupied homes in December 2024⁵ and nine by the middle of 2025,⁴ but the first four years produced almost nothing.

Jasper burned in July 2024. Parks Canada publishes a rebuild dashboard, and as of its August 10, 2026 update, of 374 properties needing to be rebuilt:⁶

Two years on, 14% of families are home. Half the properties have not yet reached a building permit application.

The McDougall Creek fire took 191 homes around West Kelowna in August 2023 and caused $480 million in insured damage.⁷ By May 2025, twenty-one months after the fire, West Kelowna had taken in 102 permit applications. Of those, 51 were for demolition and 44 were to actually rebuild a home.⁷

The same fire, two speeds

The McDougall Creek fire crossed a jurisdictional boundary. It destroyed homes in West Kelowna, and it destroyed 13 structures on Westbank First Nation land: twelve single-family homes and a fourplex.⁷

Same fire, same week, and the same insurers, trades and lumber prices on both sides of the line. By May 2025 nearly every Westbank First Nation home was rebuilt or under construction, several already had occupancy permits, and 10 of the 12 single-family lots had building permits issued.⁷

Westbank's leadership credited self-government. Their own processes let them move straight from demolition to permitting while keeping community needs in front. West Kelowna officials, describing the same period, pointed to insurance disputes and shifting building codes.⁷

Westbank controlled its own permitting and went from demolition to approval without waiting on anyone. West Kelowna's rebuild depended on insurers and a changing code, and neither of those sat with the city.

The assumption usually runs the other way, that rebuilding on reserve land is slower and more tangled. In the one case where the same fire hit both sides of a jurisdictional line, the opposite happened.

Where the years actually go

Four things stand between a burned lot and a building permit.

Insurance settlement comes first, and it is the item most often blamed for holding up everything behind it.⁷ Total-loss claims stall on replacement-cost disputes and on underinsurance, because construction costs rise faster than coverage gets updated. Additional living expenses, which pay for temporary accommodation, are covered only for a limited period, and both the limit and the duration vary by policy.¹³ That money can run out well before there is a house to move into.

Debris removal takes months, and nothing else starts until the lot is clear. After a major fire that happens on a program schedule rather than yours.

Archaeology takes months or years. It is the item on this list specific to BC, and it gets its own section below.

Permitting and design add several more months at the end, once everything else has cleared.

Any one of these is survivable. The problem is that they tend to run one after another, and most of them do not actually depend on each other.

The Heritage Conservation Act, and who pays for it

Under the Heritage Conservation Act, archaeological sites are protected whether or not they have been recorded, and on private land as much as public.⁹ Ground cannot be disturbed without an assessment and a permit, and referral to affected First Nations is part of the process.

The cost falls on whoever applies for the building permit. After a fire, that is the homeowner.⁸

In Lytton, Mayor Denise O'Connor reported that ten homeowners received quotes between $26,000 and $46,000. One was quoted $82,000 and cancelled their building permit rather than pay it. Two archaeologists were delegated to the entire village, and work plans and approvals took months.⁸

Insurance does not cover any of it. As the Mayor put it, residents "many of whom lost everything and are already underinsured due to rising construction costs, are being asked to pay out of pocket for these studies and simply cannot shoulder this financial burden."⁸

The province has since raised its Lytton archaeology grant cap from $5,000 to $20,000, effective February 11, 2025, alongside a 50% reduction in building permit fees.¹ The grant covers most of a $26,000 quote and under a quarter of an $82,000 one.

Funding was not the problem

The Auditor General of British Columbia examined wildfire recovery in a March 2026 report and criticized the province's hands-off posture.¹⁰ BC requires recovery to be community-led, then leaves communities to it without checking whether they can carry it. The auditor found Lytton officials were "immediately overwhelmed" by the rebuild.¹¹

Lytton is the clearest case. It was handed responsibility for its own recovery while being, in its Mayor's description, a village without the resources, staff, capacity or expertise to run one.³ The report recommended the province assess community capacity before assigning that role. It arrived five years too late for Lytton.³

Money was never short. Lytton had a record $239 million in committed recovery funding well before most of its residents had a permit.¹²

If you are facing this

Start the archaeology assessment early. It is the longest item, the least predictable, and it does not depend on your insurance settlement. Beginning it while your claim is still open can take a year off the far end. Budget for it as a real cost, because your policy will not reimburse it.⁸

Assume the four stages can overlap, because nobody else will overlap them for you. Insurance, debris, archaeology and design are handled by four different parties, none of whom is coordinating with the others. Waiting for a clean handoff between them is how people lose years.

Document replacement cost now, in current dollars. Underinsurance shows up in every one of these fires, and it is far easier to argue before a settlement is set than after.

Ask early who controls your permitting and what capacity they have. Whether that is a municipality, a regional district, a First Nation or a federal agency turns out to matter more than anything else in the record. We later measured how long that takes in a normal market: Vancouver and Calgary permit times compared.

Two fires are burning in the Okanagan as this is published. Bradley Creek has destroyed roughly 230 homes on Okanagan Indian Band land near Vernon,¹⁵ with 245 Band structures damaged or destroyed.¹⁴ Bald Range has burned more than 24,000 hectares west of Summerland¹⁷ and damaged or destroyed around 150 structures, 110 of them in the Faulder and Meadow Valley area and 40 in the District of Summerland. That count includes barns and other farm buildings as well as houses, which is worth remembering before reading it as 150 homes.¹⁶ Penticton RCMP confirmed the death of an 80-year-old Meadow Valley resident who died while trying to leave her home, with the BC Coroners Service investigating.¹⁸

Kyrax is a builder, and we may end up doing wildfire rebuild work. That is why we went looking at this. The data is public either way, and the record of the last three fires says the wait is longer than people are told, the reasons are mostly procedural, and several of them can be started sooner than most people realise.