Years of warnings about inadequate flood prevention and mitigation measures were ignored ahead of last week’s catastrophic flooding, says a Vancouver-based flood management consulting firm.
In a report earlier this year, Ebbwater Consulting warned the “current model for flood risk governance in B.C. is broken,” and advised the province to take a more proactive approach.
That builds on years of concern about more than 1,100 kilometres of sporadically maintained dikes across the province, said the firm’s principal and founding engineer Tamsin Lyle.
“For the last 20 to 30 years we’ve been presenting this information, providing updates on what we think it would cost if there was a large flood in the Fraser Valley or elsewhere in the country or in the province,” she told Global News.
“But for the most part that falls on deaf ears until there’s actually an event.”
In 1948, dike breaches contributed to one of the most damaging floods in B.C. history, according to the province.
That flood in the Fraser Valley — parts of which are underwater again this week — caused several casualties, destroyed about 2,000 homes, and did roughly $210 million in damage.
Dike breaches also played a major role this time, with breaches in Abbotsford, B.C., contributing to the evacuation and flooding of the Sumas Prairie.
Today there are 600 kilometres of dikes in the Lower Mainland alone, but they’re managed by a variety of governments, farmers and other authorities or stakeholders, leading to inconsistent maintenance.
Some dikes are “orphaned,” meaning they receive no maintenance at all.
“There are many that are substandard and we know that they fail when they’re not maintained, and they fail even when they are maintained,” said Lyle.
“Dikes are not a good solution for all flood mitigation problems.”
Ebbwater Consulting has advised the B.C. government to change its flood management “paradigm” and create a clear and consistent authority structure that spells out who is responsible for what.
That means a central knowledge hub within the provincial government that collaborates with Ottawa and develops best practices across the province, and regional hubs that focus on specific watersheds and support underserved communities, according to its 2021 report.
“In order to enable this big change, we also need to change how we govern the problem, to manage the fact that it is a classic, wicked and systemic problem,” Lyle explained.
British Columbia’s approach to flood management is a reflection of the “1950s era of big engineering,” said Lyle, and there are now “many other solutions” the province should consider.
Those include building more flood-resilient homes without drywall or carpeting, she said, changing land-use patterns, and taking critical infrastructure and vulnerable people out of possible paths of destruction.
“It’s going to cost billions of dollars to at least get us back to the functional state of being,” said Lyle.
“It definitely is an urgent thing that we need to be thinking about in terms of planning, but I don’t think we should be acting right away while we’re all emotional and miserable, because we’re going to make poor choices at this point.”
Three new atmospheric rivers are forecasted to hit the province between Wednesday night and next Tuesday, and Environment Canada has warned they could worsen the existing flooding conditions.
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