PENTICTON – Communities in the path of a wildfire that subsided over the weekend were lucky to avoid a worse fate, says the mayor of Penticton, B.C. An evacuation alert was lifted Monday for 3,669 properties in the city’s southeast, where residents have spent nearly one week prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. Officials said they are working to ensure it is safe for hundreds of evacuees on the other side of the 20-square-kilometre blaze to return home before lifting an evacuation order covering 319 properties. “We just didn’t experience the bad luck — we’ll call it bad luck — that other communities have,” Mayor John Vassilaki said… Wildfires have intensified in recent years in Canada’s western provinces and both 2017 and 2018 were record-breaking years in British Columbia. …More than 300 properties in the neighbourhood just north of Okanagan Falls remain under an evacuation order…