the flooding river tore away over 3 million cubic meters of rock & dirt

November 29, 2022 9:40 AM

“Once the river broke the record, your mindset is, ‘It’s not going to get any higher.’” A riveting account of the horrifying 2021 "atmospheric river" storm and flooding in British Columbia that resulted in an estimated $13 billion in damages.

More on "ARkStorms," named for an "atmospheric river (AR) 1,000 (k) storm"), a "megastorm" scenario originally projected as a 1-in-1000-year event. The scenario was based on repeated historical events that were documented in geologic and historical records. ARkStorm addresses massive U.S. West Coast storms analogous to those that devastated California in 1861-62 and with magnitudes projected to become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change.

posted by spamandkimchi (20 comments total)

That was just one of the events in BC which has really given the last few years here more of an End Times vibe than I feel comfortable with. Pandemic, heat dome that killed hundreds, floods destroying the homes of thousands, fires wiping out whole towns…I’ve been very lucky to be minimally affected by all of those, but I certainly feel less safe than I did.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:49 AM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oof. This was the same year as the record heat dome and lots of forest fires (yet still only third worst season on record, after 2018 and 2017), greatly worsening the landslides resulting from the extreme rain. The pictures and videos of highway bridges washed out were wild. For context, there are relatively few highway connections between the Lower Mainland and the rest of Canada. There are many communities served by just one or two highway connections to everything else. There were times when populated areas were totally cut off, with 18,000 stranded still after the worst was over.

A large area of intensive agriculture was largely flooded. 630,000 chickens, 420 cattle and 12,000 hogs died in horrific conditions. Fish habitat was and is still severely contaminated and unsafe for several species.

For the effect on animals, the Netflix documentary Sea Wolf was filmed at the same time on Vancouver Island and showed both the effect of the heat dome (little food as fish sought deeper waters, heat exhaustion) and atmospheric river (river beds washed out, salmon spawning grounds messed with).

Very end times vibes.
posted by lookoutbelow at 10:15 AM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

My family is in Vancouver, and after my Dad died in 2019, we wanted to take his ashes North to the town where we lived as kids and scatter them near there. Between covid, floods, and fires, it took us until June of 2022 before we were able to find a week when my mom, my brother and I could all go AND the highways were open AND the highways would probably still be open by the end of the week. When we drive through the Fraser canyon, there's a large rock that sticks out of the water that we have always used to track the water levels while we drive by it. Sometimes it's a giant rock, sometimes it's just a couple of feet of rock sticking up. The June 2022 flooding wasn't as bad as the November 2021 flooding, but when we drove by where that rock, we had to guess exactly where it was by the eddies swirling above it, because the rock was not visible above the water level at all. I have never seen that in 40 years of driving that highway.

We have been fortunate that so far, that delayed trip and a delay in shipping something by rail, are the only direct effects we've felt from all the climate-change related catastrophes in BC, but there's just so much now that I'm hard-pressed to see a future where BC ever has truly reliable highway access to the North. People will always have to plan travel with one eye on whether they will be able to get back where they came from.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:50 AM on November 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

See, this is why there's no point in climate activitists letting air out of SUV tyres or blowing up pipelines.

The climate itself can come along and *boom* take out major highways.

If that's not enough to motivate people to take the steps necessary to avoid this ongoing catastrophe then a few more pipelines blown up ain't gonna do shit.
posted by happyinmotion at 11:01 AM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

quite a read! what a harrowing situation for everyone involved.

I have long considered Australia to be a "canary in the coal mine" re coming changes, but Phalene is right, this is not just a global south issue. I have come to consider the PNW another canary. its already a place that seems to be experiencing more change, more extremes, more rapidly. and its a pretty fragile place in a lot of ways.

let us take warning and get our ducks in a row, before they get washed away in a 1000 year flood :(
posted by supermedusa at 11:32 AM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

As a Vancouverite, the above is weird, yes, (esp. the heat dome, we were going to stay in Lillooet, the day of the fire, we passed as the pool at our hotel was broken, and kept driving to Harrison.) But even stranger is the lack of moisture this fall, it's November, it should be raining 24/7 now. Yes we've had a few storms, but absolutely nothing like it should be.

Strange days indeed.
posted by Keith Talent at 11:41 AM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Agree, as a Vancouverite it has been strange spending lots of the last 3 years fretting about insufficient rain.
posted by lookoutbelow at 11:43 AM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Gulf coast, too. Hurricanes as the most obvious megastorm, but also freezes and floods and devestating heat.
posted by Jacen at 11:45 AM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

This story reminded me of “When the River Rises” from Texas Monthly about the 2015 floods on the Blanco River in Texas. It is absolutely horrific what happens when smaller rivers suddenly rise to levels unseen in modern times, if ever. (I thought that article had been posted here before as an FPP, if not in the comments somewhere, but I can’t find it.)
posted by TedW at 12:02 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Nature is powerful, but so is human determination to deny the inconvenient.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:06 PM on November 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

After the flooding took out the highways, we had gas rationing and runs on the grocery stores here in Vancouver, and we were only cut off for a couple of days (a major city! cut off from the rest of the country!). Other parts of BC had it much worse.

This year has been so dry that the Sunshine Coast, which is literally just north of Metro Vancouver, was in a state of emergency from mid-October to mid-November. They were very close to just straight up running out of water. The water restrictions imposed in August (no filling pools, no watering lawns, no washing cars, no cleaning windows) are still in place.

If that's not enough to motivate people to take the steps necessary to avoid this ongoing catastrophe then a few more pipelines blown up ain't gonna do shit.

It's going to take a lot of natural disasters to counter the oil and gas influence on BC politics. Meanwhile, indigenous-led resistance to fossil fuel projects has prevented the equivalent of 25% of US & Canadian annual carbon emissions. It's also helped to drive up the cost of projects like TMX and Coastal Gaslink, undermining the business case for more fossil fuel infrastructure in the medium term. And that's without blowing up pipelines. Every little bit counts.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:34 PM on November 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

The flood last year is still impacting perennial crops in the Fraser Valley this year.

This year's heat was nowhere near as bad as the heat domes of last year, but the drought this year killed a lot of salmon [cbc.ca] (content warning - stream beds of dead salmon)

We're looking at a couple of atmospheric rivers dumping snow on us over the next week.

hakai.org (the publisher of the article) are good people.
posted by porpoise at 12:56 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just looked it up, and Highway 8 reopened, on a limited basis, including gravel sections and temporary one-way bridges, on November 9th. Two weeks ago. 361 days after it was officially closed by this disaster.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:57 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Our amazing infrastructure took years to build the first time and we aren’t _that_ much faster now. There’s so much mass to move, and so many tests to do.

I feel like making SUVs and their ilk really unattractive to drive would make it far less lethal to use lighter methods of transport, all of which should set us up better for any Party’s Over lives.
posted by clew at 1:04 PM on November 29, 2022

That was a great article, so much information, and poignant. I had never heard of the Tula Foundation before. The emphasis on the people along the river was handled very well. I have family in the area, including folks who lost land when rivers up and moved, and those who were cut off with washed-out roads or without landline service and power for an extended period of time (i.e. weeks and months). As the article notes, there's no cell service in a lot of those areas unless you are on top of a mountain. All through the summer people were on social media posting that they'd found a snowmobile or a picnic table or a fire pit sticking up out of the silt.
posted by Cuke at 1:18 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

I appreciated how the author tried to emphasize how very normal it is for roads to get washed out in the interior*. Or power lines to go down. The regular threat of forest fire. Or just a big hail storm in August. Roads are expensive, and all the highways except #1 are so narrow. You’ll have a meter and then its a mountain or a river, and often both. A rock face in one side window and out the other a cement barrier keeping you from driving off into the river.

My hometown got hit real bad, but that was a totally different flood.

*The interior’ is what the branch manager would say right before laying off the whole second shift. The places are called the island, the lower mainland, or some pejorative for Van, and it was everything else we just called BC.
posted by zenon at 2:09 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

A different view on the same story . . .
Residents on the Sowaqua Creek off the Coquihalla Highway just NE of Hope BC, cut off in both directions, meet stranded strangers Mike and Ute as they keep camp and carry on in their RV just after the flood.
Mike and Ute escape and go home one month on.
Reunion with Mike ad Ute one year on.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:19 PM on November 29, 2022

it's November, it should be raining 24/7 now

Welp, now it’s snowing. My youngest 2 kids were born on Sept 16th, when it was unseasonably warm, dry and sunny. In the 2 and a bit months they’ve been here, we’ve had summer, autumn and winter weather. It’s weird.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 6:35 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

It was interesting reading about how the fires turned the ground waxey so that it couldn't absorb the water, making it all runoff.
posted by blueberry monster at 8:24 PM on November 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Having finally RTFA, it's fantastic. Long read and wholly worthwhile.
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:03 PM on November 29, 2022 [1 favorite]