How a BC Interior Company Kept Payroll Running During a Wildfire Evacuation, and What Every Okanagan Business Should Learn From It
Smoke on the horizon. An evacuation order. Power going dark.
For businesses across BC’s interior, wildfire season is an annual reality; one that is getting more intense, more unpredictable, and more disruptive with each passing year. In the summer of 2026, fires burning near Summerland, BC put that reality to the test for one of our clients.
What happened next is a story every business owner in the Okanagan should read before wildfire season hits home.
The Situation: Payroll for Hundreds of Employees Was on the Line
BCMI is the centralized accounting and payroll provider for 13 hospitality properties across British Columbia and Alberta. Every pay period, hundreds of hotel and restaurant employees depend on BCMI to process payroll accurately and on time.
When wildfires spread near Summerland, evacuation orders were issued, and power to the surrounding area was cut. BCMI’s office closed immediately and with it, access to the on-premises server that ran their accounting and payroll systems.
The clock was ticking. Payroll was due the following Monday.
This wasn’t a cybersecurity incident or a hardware failure. It was a wildfire that brought a business to the edge of a crisis that had nothing to do with anything they did wrong.
The Risk Nobody Prepares For
Most businesses think about IT risk in terms of hackers, ransomware, or hard drive crashes. Fewer think about the day their building simply becomes inaccessible.
Wildfire evacuations, flooding and extended power outages are the scenarios that expose a dangerous gap in traditional IT setups: on-premises infrastructure only works when you can get to it.
If your critical business systems live on a server inside your office, and your office is behind a fire line, you have a problem. No amount of antivirus software or password policies will help you process payroll from a hotel room two towns away.
The question Okanagan businesses need to ask right now is not “could this happen to us?”, it’s “if it did, how quickly could we recover?”
What a Real Disaster Recovery Plan Looks Like
Fortunately, BCMI had already partnered with Carpathia IT and invested in a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution before the emergency occurred.
When BCMI reached out to Carpathia on a Saturday, the day after evacuation, the response was immediate. The Carpathia team activated the disaster recovery plan and initiated a full cloud failover of BCMI’s production environment.
Within hours, Carpathia had:
- Restored BCMI’s complete server infrastructure in the cloud
- Re-established access to all accounting and payroll applications
- Confirmed all current data was intact and available
- Enabled secure remote access for BCMI staff from any device, anywhere
By Monday morning, payroll systems were fully operational. Accounting staff were working normally. Every employee across 13 hospitality properties received their paycheck on time.
From emergency call to fully functional cloud workspace: under 12 hours.
Not a weekend of panic. Not a missed payroll. No lost data. A seamless, behind-the-scenes recovery that employees never noticed.
The Three Ingredients That Made It Possible
This outcome didn’t happen by chance. Three things made the difference:
1. The plan was in place before the disaster. Disaster recovery plans are only effective when they exist before the emergency. BCMI had made the investment months earlier, and that investment paid off in a single weekend.
2. Rapid expert response. When every hour matters, having a team that treats your emergency with urgency is not optional. Carpathia mobilized immediately on a Saturday and worked through the recovery without delay.
3. Cloud failover capability. Because BCMI’s BCDR solution included cloud-based recovery, the physical state of their office was irrelevant to their operational continuity. The systems moved to the cloud. The staff followed.
What Happened After the Fires
The wildfire event not only validated BCMI’s disaster recovery strategy, but it also accelerated a longer-term technology transformation.
Following the recovery, Carpathia worked with BCMI to modernize their infrastructure permanently, implementing a cloud-first approach built on Microsoft 365 and cloud-hosted applications. Today, BCMI’s team can securely access critical systems from virtually anywhere.
Is Your Business Ready?
Right now, fires are burning across the BC interior. Evacuation orders are active in multiple communities. Power outages are affecting businesses from Kelowna to Kamloops.
If your business relies on on-premises servers or local infrastructure, here are the questions you need to answer today:
- If your office was inaccessible for a week, could your staff keep working?
- When did you last test your backup and recovery process?
- How long would it take to restore your critical systems?
- Do you have a documented incident response plan with clear roles and responsibilities?
If you’re not confident in those answers, you are not alone, and there is still time to act.
Carpathia IT offers Business Continuity Assessments for Okanagan businesses. We’ll review your current setup, identify your vulnerabilities, and build a recovery plan tailored to your operations before the next emergency arrives.