Cooler temperatures were welcomed Saturday by crews battling the Terrace Mountain wildfire in the B.C. Interior, but rising winds have breathed new life into the massive blaze.

As a result, 2,150 Kelowna residents are under an evacuation order, with 2,526 on evacuation alert, according to Kelowna emergency operations centre spokesman Bruce Smith.

Earlier Saturday, a fire information officer had predicted that rising winds would likely cause trouble.

"The winds are up, so we could see some flare-ups on the interior of the fire," Mitch Miller told CBC News.

"Our priority today is to keep the fire from spreading north across Shortz Creek. We've had some challenging spot fires on the north side of the creek, and we've got a couple of medium helicopters with buckets and we're trying to move crews in there."

Fire crews have been making excellent progress and have been widening the fireguard, but the work is far from over, Miller said.

More than 400 firefighters are still fighting the blaze, which encompasses about 85 square kilometres of Okanagan forest.

On another fire front, the remaining evacuees in the Bella Coola region were set to go home on Saturday. Crews continued to mop up the area on B.C.'s central coast, but the threat level had decreased enough to allow people back to their homes, officials said. Evacuation alerts remained in place in affected areas throughout the region.