Why Abbotsford, BC faces crushing floodwaters

Jordan Everyone in British Columbia knew it was going to be bad. Everyone across Canada did. The reality was still worse.

News Clip 1 …that’s Highway One, the Trans Canada, underwater. Some semi trucks stranded and water is still pouring in…

Jordan As devastating as the storm itself has been, as bad as the damage to infrastructure across the province, and as much as we know that the death toll may climb in the days to come, there is still one looming disaster. On Tuesday night, the town of Abbotsford, BC, issued a chilling warning. Evacuate everyone. Right now, your lives are at stake.

News Clip 2 …the Barrowtown pump station is capable of pumping over a half a million gallons per minute with all four pumps running at full tilt, which is what they’ve been doing…

Jordan That evacuation is, as I record this, still necessary. The town and the people in it are still in massive danger. A gigantic flood could be unleashed at any moment. But the worst case scenario had been held at bay. Not by luck, not by the weather, by people, lots of people.

News Clip 3 …the disaster has brought this community together, with strangers providing shelter, food and help with rescues. It’s all hands on deck…

…I just try to come down here and help where I can…

Jordan So what happens now? Will this effort save the town? Will the waters recede? Why is one pumping station holding a town’s fate in its hands anyway? How did that situation come to be? And finally, I don’t even need to ask this anymore at this point, but I will. Is this enough for everyone to take the climate crisis seriously? British Columbia has had a 100 year fire and a 100 year flood within a few months of one another. So if this isn’t enough, then what? Because I don’t know.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is the big story. Tyler Olsen is the managing editor of The Fraser Valley Current. Tyler, thank you for finding the time for us today. I know it’s a crazy situation where you are.

Tyler Thanks for having me.

Jordan Why don’t you just tell me before we get into how we got here, what happens next and how dangerous it is, we’re speaking about midday in BC time on Wednesday, What’s happening right now, as we’re talking? What are we watching right now?

Tyler We are actually in a weird and unclear moment in which last night Abbotsford sent out a very urgent press release and then had a very urgent press conference at which they said it was possible, and in the press release, likely, that the Barrowtown Pump station, which is a key piece of infrastructure in what is a pretty complex system. They said that they expected that pump station to fail and that would cause catastrophic damage and posed an immediate and serious risk to life.

Right now, this morning, we have learned that that pump station didn’t fail, which is very good, in part because of a lot of work overnight in building a dam around the pump station. There was work sandbagging that pump station, and right now it sounds like the station is holding and there is a little bit more positivity, and it doesn’t seem to be as urgent a situation as last night. That said, it’s still unclear the situation in the whole Prairie and whole Valley as it is because there’s water moving still from the United States into Canada, and that water is moving slowly, although not very slowly, across the entire Prairie into and towards an area just south of Barrowtown, that Barrowtown pump station is meant to drain, which is the old Lake bed of the Sumas Lake.

Jordan I’m going to get you to give us the context on Sumas Lake and what flows into it and around it because it’s fascinating. But first, maybe just describe for our listeners outside of British Columbia what’s it been like for the past few days? What have you seen? What have you heard? Are you okay?

Tyler So I am like a lot of people actually, isolated elsewhere. I’m not in my home. I’m isolated a little bit in the interior in a family members home, in part because I was here when the rainstorm hit. And that— rain storm is kind of understating it—has left the provinces transportation systems impassable. So, few people can get where they want to go or where they were intending to go. And I’m one of them. So I’ve been coordinating this in part from outside of the immediate vicinity. That said, at the Fraser Valley Current, we have two reporters and they are in the area. They too, haven’t been going too much to these places because it’s too dangerous people shouldn’t be going to these places. The situation is unclear and the authorities need room to work.

That said, we have seen, and it’s remarkably easy to see and hear from readers a range of challenges that they’ve been facing. We’ve heard of from people stranded on the highways and unable to get food or get to their homes after intending to go out to actually help other people deal with them, as we’ve heard from people stranded in communities and people who are watching their livelihoods and concerned about whether their livelihoods will be around in a week or so. We’ve heard from people who need to get to their urgent appointments and don’t know when the highway between Chilliwack and Abbotsford, which is a key artery and lots of people live in Chilliwack and work in Abbotsford, and some people work in Chilliwack and live in Abbotsford. They may be stranded at work. I have a close friend who is stranded in Langley right now, and he’s been there for a couple of days and he doesn’t know when he’ll get home and see his family.

So those are the situations facing a lot of people right now, but it depends on where you work and where you live. We have readers who’ve been evacuated from their homes and don’t know when they’ll be able to return or even how high the water will come and how close the water will come to their homes. So there’s a lot going on, and it’s a complex and scary situation for a lot of people.

Jordan In terms of Abbottsford itself and the pumping station that you mentioned in particular, and you also mentioned that there’s still water coming from the United States. When officials describe the situation as potentially catastrophic and immediate risk to life, how bad could it get? What happens if that pumping station does fail?

Tyler If the pumping station fails, what we’ve heard is that the water will start coming from the north into the area that pumping station is meant to drain, which lies at an old Lake bed. It lies at sea level, which is below the level of the even the nearby Fraser River. So to understand that you have to start to get a good grasp of the region’s geography, and I’m sure we will get into that. But basically you can be looking at nine to 10ft of water on top of whatever is at the bottom of that Lake bed. And that’s probably a low estimate, in the worst case scenario.

The city had commissioned a report that was published last year that looked at possible scenarios from a flood from the Nooksack River, which is what’s happening now. And the worst case scenario suggested a very large expanse of land would be under up to 3 meters or more of water. The worst case scenario didn’t even envision the Barrow Town pump station going down, and so it’s hard to tell how much worse that would make things, but it wouldn’t make things better. And that worst case scenario is pretty bad to start with.

Jordan Maybe now we can zoom out a bit and look at the big picture and the history and the complexity that you mentioned. I know that yourself and your colleague Grace Kennedy, along with help from Joti Grewal, have done a really deep dive on everything that’s at play here, creating a huge risk to Abbottsford. Maybe you could kind of explain how all this came to be and situate us, give us a picture of what’s really happening on the ground there.

Tyler I’m going to try to first paint a picture of where Sumas Prairie, which is the area that we’re talking about, where that sits in relation to the rest of Abbotsford. The general core of Abbotsford actually sits on an elevated rise. And so most of Abbotsford is not in jeopardy here. What we’re talking about here is what we call Sumas Prairie, which is about a 15 kilometer long Valley, a four kilometer wide Valley, so about 60 km². That is kind of a side Valley as part of the larger Fraser Valley, which is the broad Valley that carries the Fraser River from the interior of British Columbia into the Pacific Ocean.

So this side Valley is exceptionally flat. It’s exceptionally fertile land. It’s quite populated, but it’s mostly populated by farms because that farmland is also protected by provincial rules. What all that means is that a lot of the provincial infrastructure runs through this Valley. There’s the TransCanada highway, the Trans Mountain pipeline, Hydro power transmission lines and all that moves through this fairly narrow corridor. This Valley is a very flat Valley, bracketed on both sides by fairly steep mountains. And at the center of it used to be Sumas Lake, which was a Lake for millennia. Essentially, that was kind of the key to life for many Indigenous people in the Fraser Valley.

About 100 years ago, as settlement grew in the Valley work started to drain that Lake and turn it into fertile agricultural land. The Sumas First Nation, the First Nation that was closest to the lake, weren’t in favour of the plan, but they, as often happened in the day, didn’t have the power, or the people who were behind the project had their own intentions. And they did not see the value in this lake, which had provided food and sustenance and a home, a second home, essentially for a lot of First Nations, for again, thousands of years. The Lake was drained, and now the bottom of it is some of the most fertile agricultural land in the province. There’s a large number of poultry operations, a large number of dairy operations. The land is extremely valuable as far as farmland goes. So currently it’s the centre of agriculture, one of the centres of BC’s agriculture industry, and it’s key in that regard.

Sumas Lake, though, existed because for the reasons that all Lakes exist, water flows downhill into a basin until it reaches a certain height, and then it goes somewhere else. In Sumas Lake’s case, the water drained from the nearby Hills. It also at one time came from the Nooksack River, which is a river that right now flows completely south of the border in kind of a semicircle from the foothills of Mount Baker, the volcano just to the south of Abbotsford, to the Pacific Ocean near Bellingham, Washington. That river, again, is completely in the United States, but it didn’t always used to be like that. It used to flow into Sumas Lake.

At some point, that river took a different course and went to the west. When it did so, though, essentially the part of the river that used to flow north continued to flow north. So you have the drainage from the basin for the Sumas River, which is kind of the little tiny tributary that now exists where the Nooksack once existed, run up basically right to the banks of the Nooksack River. It’s about 100 yards from one to the other, I think. And so when that Nooksack River overflows, when it floods to the north or to the east, then all that water goes north. It just runs downhill straight into Canada and straight towards what was Sumas Lake. So that’s kind of the situation we have now, which is a lot of water moving from the Nooksack River. And I think the Nooksack River has stopped flooding, but a lot of water moving from there now towards the old Lake bed of Sumas Lake. There’s a dike in between but yesterday, Abbotsford’s Mayor said that that dike wasn’t high enough to stop the water from moving towards the lake bed, and it potentially could fail in certain places.

So that’s kind of the situation now, and how all these different geographical features factor into play.

Jordan Is that where the pumping station comes in, to deal with that overflow from the Nooksack if it starts coming down?

Tyler The pumping station is essentially just there to deal with the everyday water that flows into Sumas Prairie and would otherwise fill up. Sumas Lake would fill up whether the Nooksack flowed into or not because it was here 150 years ago, long after the Nooksack took its course towards the Pacific. So the Barrowtown pump station is a maintenance pump station that in winter, when it rains a lot, all four pumps go to drain the Prairie. It’s an exceptionally complex system. I was in there five years ago or so and just figuring out what water is going where, is something that’s hard to wrap your mind around in normal times and now is obviously not normal times.

Jordan I think this is what the rest of Canada is trying to understand is just how complex those systems are when you’re dealing with elevation and different rivers and places that used to be Lakes, but aren’t anymore. It’s a big thing to wrap your mind around. And I guess my question is, you mentioned a report a few minutes ago, local officials, emergency planners, how aware were they of the possibility of something this epic or catastrophic happening and how ready is the town and the services that support it for something like this?

Tyler They were quite aware, actually. Five years or so ago, the city of Abbotsford conducted a risk assessment of all the potential emergencies and natural disasters that could affect it. And flooding was one that was deemed to be both potentially among the most damaging and among the most likely in that group. There are two potential floods, one from the Fraser River and one from the Nooksack River. And I remember hearing from the fire chief at the time saying that the Nooksack is something that essentially keeps them up at night worrying sometimes because it is something that looms just out of sight. But we’ve seen in the past, in 1990 it flooded Highway 1, and it has the potential to do that again, everybody was aware.

One of the issues, though, and it was recognized at the time, and I think it did start some conversations, and it was one of the reasons we saw that report tabled last year, is that there hasn’t been much done since 1990. There was an international task force after that flood, and then it stopped meeting I believe in 2012, and it didn’t meet for several years. And there are various international reasons why that is. There are actually different interests at play here between the US flood mitigation planners and the Canadian ones. The Canadian ones, their interest is in protecting Canadians and Canadian properties. The Americans are concerned about protecting American properties and their residents and the people they serve.

And one of the tricky things is, unless you stop it right at the source—which I believe is probably the best option, but for some reason is tough to do—to stop that water anywhere after it escapes the channel becomes tricky in the United States, because essentially Canada functions as an escape valve for that water. Once it leaves the Nooksack River, it has to go somewhere and it will flow downhill until it stops. But if it’s stopped in Canada, it will start to back up in the United States and go deeper and deeper and start affecting people there. So it’s an exceptionally complex issue to deal with on a flood mitigation aspect, because it’s in Abbotsford’s interest to keep that water in the channel, and it’s also in the American interest. But if you accept the fact that probably that river is going to flood at some point sometime, as soon as that water escapes the Nooksack river, people have very different interests in where exactly it goes.

Jordan As it became clear that the failure of the pumping station was a real concern, that the water from the Nooksack was on the way, what happened? You mentioned that the town put out a press release. I’ve seen some people asking why no emergency alert was issued to everyone. Can you kind of take us inside what you know about what happened over the course, I guess, of yesterday evening?

Tyler Sure. The Nooksack River and the flooding from there has been obvious for a couple of days. What became new was essentially the scale and the amount of water that was coming across the border, but also the impact, as you said, at Barrowtown, which kind of took me by surprise at 730, when the city issued their very urgent press release. There were some questions about whether the city should be using a notification system that was offered up by the province. That notification system, which the province offered to the city hasn’t been used before in a local emergency. Lots of people were calling for it to be used during the summer, during the wildfires, and it wasn’t used then. But this morning Abbotsford’s Mayor Henry Braun said they declined that offer, in part because they found that it was more prudent to connect people directly because there weren’t actually a large number of people still in Sumas Prairie. They were all quite keenly aware that there was an issue.

It’s hard to say why and how and how those calls are made. Our emergency planning apparatus in British Columbia and across the country, as I understand, is incredibly opaque. We don’t know much about what happens. They don’t seem extremely eager to share information until the last possible moment in general. So I’m not sure if we’ll ever get those answers. And I think there’s a lot of skepticism about how the communication has been run, both in this instance and in the wildfires and pandemic. And I think in my personal view, there is a general reticence to declare emergencies or even suggest that there might be a problem until that problem has already arrived. It’s likely that they actually did believe that Barrowtown pump station was a serious problem. You can see that from just the urgency with which this happened. There was a tweet sent out that was kind of mangled, and hadn’t been proofread.

Jordan It was scary.

Tyler You kind of felt that they felt scared, too. And so I think that in hindsight, Barrowtown is still pumping water at this moment, but clearly there were some very worried people last night.

Jordan Tell me about at least one of the reasons that it is still pumping water because it wasn’t just people in the evacuation zone that responded to the release that was sent out.

Tyler Right. So I can’t say how much it played a role, but we know that there was a call for people to convene, I believe it was in the parking lot of the Chilliwack Pub that’s just across the bed or canal from the Barrowtown pump station. But there were sandbags, and there was sand at this pub, essentially, and large numbers of people, too many people turned out to start filling sandbags that could then be shuttled over to Barrowtown and create a bit of a dam to stop water from entering Barrowtown pump station.

Because that was the threat that was conveyed, that if water started to enter this pump station, they would have to turn off the pumps and water would start to enter Sumas Prairie through the pump station. Essentially, the flow of water would be reversed and it would accelerate flooding in Sumas Prairie. The Mayor sounds optimistic that the water levels outside the pump station were declining and that it was bringing the water on one side, essentially of the pump station more in line with the water on the other side of the pump station, which is one of the problems is when that disparity between water levels on each side of the pump station grows, that seems to have been coming down. And that was the cause for this morning’s optimism. But that’s also one where I think authorities probably know that depending on the flow of water across the Prairie and that water that is still coming from across the border, all that water can still move north and change the calculations and the factors at play. It’s way too early to say that the pump station is out of the woods.

And even if the pump station does keep operating, it’s unclear if that’s just buying more time until water seeps into the Sumas Lake bed, or if those pumps can actually keep up with the amount of water that’s essentially heading northeast across Sumas Prairie.

Jordan This is the last thing I’m going to ask you, and I’ve asked it to probably too many BC journalists over the past year. How does it feel to you to cover the wildfires this summer, the air quality that’s been an ongoing issue because of them, now a 100 year flood. It looks to the rest of us like you guys are on the front lines of what’s coming for everyone next. And that can’t be fun to cover or to think about.

Tyler Yeah, it’s a lot to deal with, especially in the midst of a pandemic and to see the state of kind of these emergencies and the frequency at which they’re occurring and how they’re affecting people and how they’re affecting neighbors and how they change how you’re living your summer and how they’re impacting your kids. And it’s a lot to cover, but just as a person, it’s something that… it feels like they just keep coming. And sometimes big events get the blood flowing, but it gets the blood flowing because ideally they don’t happen often, they’re not something you’re covering regularly, and they’re not something that becomes a way of life.

It makes you wonder about where things are headed, what this province is going to look like, how we’re going to think about this province, how we’re going to spend our summers, whether it’s a place where tourism is actually something that is feasible, essentially. How we structure supply lines and our supply routes and how our highways operate and there’s so many moving parts. And once you start to assume that this is becoming a more common occurrence and even a regular feature of our life, then it brings a lot of different questions in that sometimes are easier not to think about.

Jordan Tyler, thank you so much for this. I hope you stay safe. I hope everybody out there stays safe where they are and gets back to where they need to be some time soon. Take care.

Tyler Thank you very much.

Jordan Tyler Olsen of the Fraser Valley Current, on the ground near Abbotsford, BC.

That was the Big Story, for more from us. Head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Email us anytime, thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com.

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Thank you for listening, I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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