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Before the smoke arrives: a Langley wildfire preparedness guide

Photo by Kym MacKinnon / Unsplash

Before the smoke arrives: a Langley wildfire preparedness guide

By Rainer Fehrenbacher
10 min read
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Provincial officials say the 2026 wildfire season could be one of the worst in recent memory.

Drought conditions across British Columbia are now more severe than they were heading into the historic 2017, 2018, and 2021 fire years, according to the BC Wildfire Service.

Long-range forecasts call for a warmer-than-normal summer, with fire activity expected to peak through July and August across the Central and Southern Interior and the South Coast.

For Langley, that means smoke is almost certainly on the way, even if no fires burn nearby. The plumes that turned local skies orange in past summers came from hundreds of kilometres away. Smoke does not respect municipal boundaries.

The good news is that the steps that protect your household are simple, affordable, and most effective if you take them now, before air quality crashes and store shelves empty out.

This guide covers the basics: a grab-and-go bag, a do-it-yourself air filter you can build for about $130, where to find clean indoor air when home is not an option, and how to look out for the people in your life who may need help.

A note on context

Wildfire smoke is not a traditional feature of West Coast summers. It became one because the climate has changed.

Canada is coming off three consecutive severe fire years, and the federal government is forecasting British Columbia to face the highest sustained fire risk in the country this summer. BC Minister of Emergency Management Kelly Greene put it plainly at a recent briefing: climate change is rewriting what counts as normal.

That bigger picture matters, but it does not change what any of us can do this weekend.

Preparing your household now will not solve the climate crisis. It will, however, make the next bad air week meaningfully easier to get through, especially for kids, elders, and anyone with a heart or lung condition.

The grab-and-go bag

A grab-and-go bag is a packed kit you can grab in under a minute if you need to leave the house. Most wildfire evacuations in BC give residents some warning, but not all of them do. Some evacuations have offered days. Others have offered hours.

Pack one bag per person, plus one for any pets, and keep them near the front door or in your vehicle.

PreparedBC recommends the following:

  • Water (4 litres per person per day, three day supply)
  • Non-perishable food (energy bars, dried fruit, canned goods, manual can opener)
  • Flashlight, hand-crank or battery radio, spare batteries
  • Phone charger and power bank
  • First aid kit
  • At least a week's supply of prescription medications
  • Copies of important documents (ID, insurance, medical records) in a waterproof bag
  • Cash in small bills
  • N95 respirators, ideally several per family member
  • Change of clothes and sturdy shoes
  • Toiletries, including any items needed for menstrual care, contact lenses, or babies
  • A written list of emergency contacts (phones die)
  • Comfort items for children

Take a few minutes to photograph the contents of your home for insurance purposes. Store the photos in cloud storage so you can access them from any device.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada notes that home insurance policies in BC cover fire damage, but provincial disaster financial assistance is not available for wildfire losses. Talk to your insurance company about what your coverage includes.

Register a household profile with Emergency Support Services (ESS) in advance through PreparedBC. ESS provides accommodation, food, and clothing to people displaced by emergencies.

Setting up a profile before you need it saves time when you are already stressed.

To pre-register follow these steps:

Step 1: Visit ess.gov.bc.ca

Step 2: Click 'Create Profile'

Step 3: Follow the BC Services Card login and registration instructions

The Township of Langley runs its own ESS program (it ended its joint program with the City in 2023), and is currently recruiting volunteers.

Build a Corsi-Rosenthal box

When the air outside is unbreathable, the goal is to make a clean room inside your home. A Corsi-Rosenthal box is a do-it-yourself air filter that performs as well as commercial purifiers costing five to ten times the price.

The name comes from Dr. Richard Corsi, dean of engineering at UC Davis, and David Rosenthal of Tex-Air Filters. They popularized the design during the COVID-19 pandemic as a cheap way to clean indoor air.

The same design works for wildfire smoke, which is mostly made up of the same kind of fine particles (PM2.5) that the filter is designed to capture.

Here is what you need:

  • One 20 inch box fan, about $30 at Canadian Tire or Home Depot
  • Four 20 inch by 20 inch MERV 13 furnace filters, about $25 each (available at most home improvement stores and online from Filterbuy or directly from Tex-Air)
  • One roll of heavy-duty duct tape, about $10
  • Scissors and a piece of cardboard from a moving box or the box your fan came in

Total cost: roughly $130 to $150 Canadian.

How to build it:

  1. Lay the four filters on a flat surface with the airflow arrows all pointing the same direction. The arrows show which way air is supposed to flow through each filter. Get this wrong and the filter will not work properly.
  2. Stand the filters up to form four walls of a cube, with the arrows all pointing inward. Tape the seams together with duct tape, making sure each joint is airtight.
  3. Cut a piece of cardboard to fit the bottom of the cube. Tape it in place. A small amount of air leak at the bottom is fine.
  4. Place the box fan on top of the cube with the fan blowing upward, away from the filters. The fan should pull air through the filters and push it out the top.
  5. Trace the round opening of the fan onto another piece of cardboard and cut out a shroud that covers the dead corners where the fan does not pull air. Tape the shroud to the top of the fan. This small step significantly improves performance.
  6. Tape the fan to the top of the filter cube. Run the fan and walk around the box with your hand near each seam. If you feel air leaking, add more tape.

Run the box on low or medium speed in whatever room people will spend the most time in. One box can handle a typical bedroom or small living room.

For a larger home, build two.

The filters last about six months under normal use, less during heavy smoke. Replace them when they look visibly grey or when airflow noticeably drops.

A note for renters: if your building has a forced-air HVAC system, ask your landlord whether the filters can be upgraded to MERV 13.

They might say no, but they might say yes, and the request creates a paper trail.

Either way, a Corsi-Rosenthal box in your unit will give you a clean room even if the building system does not.

Where to find clean indoor air

Not everyone can build a clean room at home. Older apartments, single-room occupancy buildings, and many rental suites have limited ventilation control. Single-pane windows do not seal well. Some buildings have no central air. Some households cannot afford to run a fan all day on top of summer cooling costs.

When the air gets bad, public buildings with proper filtration become essential infrastructure. The Township and City of Langley typically extend hours at civic facilities during heat and smoke events.

Watch for announcements on:

  • Township of Langley Emergency Program (tol.ca and the Langley Emergency Program Facebook page)
  • City of Langley emergency communications
  • Fraser Health air quality and heat advisories at fraserhealth.ca
  • The BC government's community response locations portal, which maps cooling centres, water fountains, and spray parks across the province

Langley Public Library branches, the Timms Community Centre, the Walnut Grove and Aldergrove community centres, and most municipal recreation facilities have air conditioning and reasonable indoor air. Malls work in a pinch. So do movie theatres.

For real-time air quality, the BC Air Quality Health Index at gov.bc.ca/airqualityhealthindex publishes current AQHI readings for Langley and Metro Vancouver.

The BlueSky Canada smoke forecast at firesmoke.ca shows projected smoke movement across the province.

Both are free, and both are accurate.

Fraser Health considers AQHI readings of 7 or higher to be high health risk, typically caused by wildfire smoke.

Anything above 10 falls into the very high risk category. When the index climbs, reduce time outdoors, close windows, and run your air filter.

Checking on the people who need it most

Wildfire smoke and extreme heat do not affect everyone equally.

The 2021 heat dome killed 619 people in BC.

The provincial coroner found that most who died were older, lived alone, or had chronic illnesses. Many lived in older buildings without air conditioning.

Heat and smoke compound each other. Closed windows trap heat. Heat increases the body's demand for clean air.

The combination is especially dangerous for:

  • older adults living alone,
  • people with asthma or COPD,
  • people with heart conditions,
  • pregnant people,
  • young children and infants,
  • people with mobility limitations,
  • disabled folks (including those whose disabilities are not visible),
  • people taking medications that affect heat regulation,
  • outdoor workers,
  • unhoused community members, and
  • renters in older buildings without cooling.

Now is a good time to think about who in your life falls into any of those categories. A short phone call this week, before the smoke arrives, can lay the groundwork for a useful check-in once it does.

Be honest and direct. "I am thinking about wildfire season, and I wanted to make sure you have what you need. Is there anything you are worried about, or anything I could help with?"

That is enough. You do not need to manage anyone's life. You do need to make sure they know they are not alone.

If someone you know lives in a place without air conditioning, offer your spare room or your couch on bad days. If they have not built a Corsi-Rosenthal box, offer to help. If they take medications that need refrigeration, talk through what they would do in a power outage. If they have pets, talk about pet supplies and evacuation options.

For unhoused community members, the most respectful thing you can do is support the organizations that already do this work year-round.

In Langley, that includes the Lookout Housing and Health Society, the Lower Fraser Valley Aboriginal Society outreach team, and the Langley Senior Resources Society.

Donations of bottled water, sunscreen, and N95 masks are reliably useful during heat and smoke events.

Other preparations worth doing now

A few additional steps make a meaningful difference.

For the home: sign up for emergency alerts through the BC Wildfire Service app and the Alertable app used by Metro Vancouver and most BC municipalities. Clear gutters and dry brush from within 1.5 metres of your house. The Township of Langley Fire Department offers free FireSmart Home Ignition Zone Assessments to residents in eligible areas, which is worth booking even if you live in town.

For your vehicle: keep the gas tank at least half full through the summer. In an evacuation, gas stations clog up fast. Stash a small kit with water, a flashlight, and a phone charger in the glove box.

For pets: pack a separate grab-and-go bag for each animal with food, water, leashes, carriers, and copies of vaccination records. Identify two or three places you could take pets in an evacuation. Most ESS reception centres now accept pets, but a backup plan helps.

For documents: scan birth certificates, passports, insurance policies, deeds, and medical records into a secure cloud folder. Keep paper copies in your grab-and-go bag.

For communication: pick a contact outside the Lower Mainland who will serve as your family's check-in point during an emergency. Long-distance calls often go through when local lines are jammed. Make sure everyone in the household knows the number.

The neighbourhood angle

The Langley City Citizens' Assembly recently recommended that Council endorse Resilient Neighbourhood Networks, a model that uses neighbourhood-level connections to improve safety, wellbeing, and emergency readiness.

The basic idea is old and proven. Communities that know their neighbours respond better to emergencies than communities that do not.

You do not have to wait for a city program to put that idea into practice.

A block party, a shared Signal or WhatsApp group, an old-fashioned phone tree, a list taped inside the kitchen cupboard: any of these works.

The point is to know who lives near you, who has what skills, who might need help, and who could provide it.

Wildfire season is no longer an interruption to normal life on the Coast. It is a feature of it.

Treating it that way means preparing for it the same way we prepare for winter: ahead of time, with the things we know we will need, in the company of the people we share this place with.

The traditional territories of the q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), qw̓ɑ:nƛ̓ə̓n̓ (Kwantlen), Mathxwí (Matsqui), and SEMYOME (Semiahmoo) First Nations have been shaped by fire for thousands of years.

Indigenous fire stewardship practices, suppressed for more than a century, are now being revisited by researchers and provincial officials as part of long-term resilience planning.

That work is upstream of any of us.

What we can do today is make sure our households and our neighbours are ready for the summer in front of us.

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Tagged in:

Community, Health, Safety, City, Township, Wildfire

Last Update: June 19, 2026

About the Author

Rainer Fehrenbacher Langley, BC

Rainer and his family live in the Nicomekl area of Langley City. During his free time, he enjoys going for bike rides with his amazing partner and laughing with his 2 year old son.

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