When Friday’s (Aug. 6) late-night evacuation order was issued, sending Gerry Mills and his family hurrying out of their new home in Mount Currie, Mills was wearily thinking, “Everything’s going again.”

Mills and his family lost their home and all possessions when a fire burned their four-bedroom trailer to the ground in the early morning hours on July 28. Mills and his wife were asleep, while son Mathew was half awake, when the blaze began in a front corner of their home, which stood on Portage Road in the Mount Currie reserve.

Around 2:30 a.m., Mills’s dogs became heroes: They started to bark, awaking the family and alerting them to the pressing danger.

“I think it was my dogs that saved my life… They just started barking and scratching at the bed with their paws,” Mills said.

When he woke up, he noticed the terrible smell of smoke. The family fled fast, out of necessity leaving behind valuable and even irreplaceable items like photos. An undercurrent in Mills’s mind wondered why this had to happen to them.

“We took off out the door with what we had on our backs,” Mills said.

Four members of the Mills family live in the home, but only three were there that night, as son Christopher was out working for the cleaning service that Mills founded in the corridor in 1986. Mathew, 24, and Christopher, 28, currently run the business.

Sadly, that night Christopher “came home to a rude awakening,” Mills said.

The three escaped the growing blaze with their heroic dogs Rascal and Daisy, but Gerry Mills had to go back inside the trailer to look for little Digger, their Yorkshire terrier, who was hiding under a bed. The smoke was so thick by then that Mills couldn’t grab any other belongings to bring out, but Digger was extracted safely.

Within minutes, the fire reduced to rubble the home that the family had lived in for nearly a year. They’ve been residents of the Pemberton area since 1997, and have lived in the Sea to Sky corridor even longer since Mills started his janitorial service.

“We lost everything, all our ID and all our spare cash,” Mills said.

He currently helps out his sons with the business, he said, but he also has to receive support from the Canada Pension Plan Disability program.

After living for a week at the Pemberton Valley Lodge with emergency program support, a positive development came the family’s way: A community member helped them find a new place to live in Mount Currie. They moved in last Thursday (Aug. 5), and on that day Mills was thinking about “trying to find some beds so we can lay down and go to sleep.”

But the move came just in time for the family to again face the threat of losing their home. They were forced to flee to higher ground at Mount Currie’s new site on Friday night (Aug. 6), frightened anew by the evacuation order stemming from the threat of valley flooding that loomed in the wake of the dramatic Mount Meager landslide.

This time, at least, the natural disaster subsided and they could return to their home – the evacuation order was lifted Saturday morning (Aug. 7).

Pemberton RCMP Sgt. Eric Rochette said police are still waiting for the report from Pemberton’s fire chief, but the blaze that devoured the Mills family’s home initial “appears to be electrical.” The trailer was fully engulfed in 10 minutes, he said, and a “quick response by the fire department” helped stave off any danger of the blaze spreading in the dry conditions and the area with livestock around.

Anyone wishing to support the Mills family could send donations to P.O. Box 1582, Squamish, B.C., V8B0B2, or use a PayPal account established under the email address king.of.pain@hotmail.com.