Pender Harbour

The regional district's wildfire plan lists Garden Bay among the communities "served by small secondary highways with no alternate access."

This page is about what that means when the house is empty and something goes wrong.

Seven hours to the hospital

On 4 February 2025, after a night of heavy snow, a Garden Bay woman with a suspected burst appendix called for an ambulance at 4:12 in the morning. She was told the Pender Harbour crew was in Sechelt and that the road was closed by fallen trees and power lines. She was told not to drive herself. The ambulance left Sechelt after five with a warning that "the usual 45-minute trip would likely take twice that."

It reached her just before seven, after passing a snowplow in the ditch on the Irvines Landing Road hill. It got stuck at the bottom of the hill, with chains on. It turned around on Lee Road and got stuck again. A heavy tow truck arrived, went into the ditch itself, then towed the ambulance up to the hall. The crew reached its sixteen-hour limit and a second ambulance was sent. She reached Sechelt hospital just after eleven — seven hours after the call.

The same storm left a Garden Bay dialysis patient without power from ten in the morning, briefly restored around midnight, then out again from two. Neighbours brought generator fuel by ATV. A ministry employee who called afterwards suggested the couple "might want to consider living somewhere less remote." Another Garden Bay resident wrote that "several neighbourhoods" had been "stranded without power for three days on unplowed streets." Two years earlier, she said, a Hydro truck had been stuck at the bottom of Irvines Landing Road during a three-day outage until a local contractor dumped a load of gravel.

That is what a February storm does to Garden Bay when people are home. When they are not, the house is on its own for the same three days, unheated.

Two houses on Narrows Road

On 16 June 2023, at about 10:40 in the morning, the fire department was called to Narrows Road at Gunboat Bay. Two houses were burning. Both were unoccupied. Nineteen Pender Harbour firefighters and two from Egmont were there until six in the evening. The cause was never reported.

It went up like it had been a fuel dump.

A neighbour, after the Narrows Road fire at Gunboat Bay, June 2023

Two empty houses, side by side, a morning fire, no one inside to smell smoke. Nobody has been able to say how it started.

In July 2024 a cottage under construction at Ruggles Bay on Sakinaw Lake burned to the ground. The property has water access and no road. The lake is "an area without fire hydrants or central water service." About forty neighbours fought it from their own docks with their own pumps until the Egmont and Pender Harbour departments and BC Wildfire arrived. Afterwards the residents set up a WhatsApp emergency group; it went from 65 members to more than 220. The structure was vacant.

In February 2022 a fire at the far end of the dock at the Garden Bay marina destroyed three 35-foot power boats and nearly a fourth. The marina was full — 90 boats. The loss was put at $800,000. The cause was undetermined.

The fire department

The Garden Bay hall on Deller Road has fifteen members and two engines. It carries 1,600 gallons of water between them and has no tender. The department's own website tells owners that insurers ask two questions: is the house within eight kilometres of a hall, and are there hydrants.

The Garden Bay crew is "often on scene before the ambulance," because the ambulance is fourteen minutes away in Madeira Park — when it is in Madeira Park.

The roads

Irvines Landing Road's curve above Mixal Lake was built in 1936 without barriers; the edge drops to 25 feet of water. A body was recovered from a submerged van there in 2006 and three more vehicles have gone in during the last ten years, including one in May 2023.

In May 2026 a delivery driver in Irvines Landing was run over by his own vehicle, found "down a steep driveway partially hanging over a cliff above a rocky shoreline." Steep driveways are normal here. In snow, many of them cannot be driven.

In December 2022 a bank failure of about a hundred tonnes closed the highway near Francis Peninsula Road for three and a half hours. In February 2024 a sinkhole closed Katherine Lake Road off Garden Bay Road for most of a month. In summer, the Earls Cove ferry queue backs up past the Egmont turn-off, and residents on Jervis Inlet Road have been unable to get out — including, in one report, "one or two volunteer firefighters on our road who cannot exit and go out to calls."

Who is here

The regional district's plan for the area says 59 per cent of its dwellings are occupied full time, against 80 per cent for the Coast and 91 per cent for the province. In the 2021 census, Area A had 2,508 dwellings and 946 with no one living in them. The median age is 61.

Property crime in Garden Bay is not often reported in the paper, because there is rarely a witness. What has been reported: community mailboxes on Roosen Road, Garden Bay Road and Hammond Road broken into or carried off whole in 2021; gas tanks drilled on Sakinaw Lake Road; a vehicle window smashed at the Sakinaw Lake boat launch; a seasonal residence at Ruby Lake entered sometime over a winter by cutting the gate lock, discovered only when the owner returned.

Eighteen homes in the Dream Valley subdivision were told in November 2022 not to drink their well water because of arsenic. The notice was lifted, then reissued, and was still in force more than a year later.

What a check in Pender Harbour covers

Every visit follows the same list and produces the same photographed record:

• The road in and the driveway: trees, lines, washouts, snow
• Doors, windows, sheds, the boathouse, the dock and what is tied to it
• Heat on and holding; no smell of gas, smoke or damp
• Water: taps, hot-water tank, floors, ceilings; the well pump and pressure tank
• Roof and gutters from the ground; trees leaning on the house or the service line
• Signs of animals; signs of people
• Mail, flyers, an unmoved car
• After a storm: an extra visit as soon as the road allows

Most home insurance policies require an empty house to be checked at set intervals during the heating season — often within four days — by a "competent person," or the water shut off and drained. The dated, photographed record is what the insurer asks for.

What it costs

A scheduled check is $55 a visit, plus $10 travel. The travel charge is the same everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee. See the full price list.

Where these facts come from

Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are listed so you can read them yourself.

1. Sunshine Coast Regional District — Community Wildfire Protection Plan, on communities with no alternate access
2. Coast Reporter, February 2025 — the Garden Bay ambulance call and the seven-hour trip to hospital
3. Coast Reporter, February 2025 — the Garden Bay dialysis patient, the power outage and the fuel brought by ATV
4. Coast Reporter, February 2025 — letters on three days without power on unplowed streets
5. Coast Reporter, 16 June 2023 — the two unoccupied houses on Narrows Road at Gunboat Bay
6. Coast Reporter, 24 July 2024 — the Sakinaw Lake fire, the neighbours who fought it, and the vacant structure
7. Coast Reporter, February 2022 — the Garden Bay marina fire
8. Coast Reporter, November 2024 — the Garden Bay fire hall, its members, and arriving ahead of the ambulance
9. Pender Harbour Volunteer Fire Department — what insurers ask about distance to a hall and hydrants
10. Coast Reporter — the Mixal Lake curve on Irvines Landing Road
11. Coast Reporter, May 2026 — the delivery driver on a steep driveway at Irvines Landing
12. Coast Reporter, November 2022 — arsenic in the Dream Valley Estates well water

Checked 11 September 2026. Newspaper and government pages do move. If a link no longer works, tell us and we will find where it went.