It Pours

Indeed.

 

British Columbia is still a disaster zone and it will get worse:

Residents of British Columbia’s north are being warned to prepare for the next atmospheric river to hit the province.

Environment Canada has issued winter storm warnings for inland sections of the North Coast, the McGregor region and Pine Pass on Highway 97, while special weather statements were issued for Haida Gwaii and coastal sections of the North Coast.

Snowfall warnings were also in place for a large swath of northern B.C., including the Prince George and the Stuart-Nechako areas.

The weather system, expected to move into the region Saturday through Monday, is forecast to bring between 100 and 150 millimetres of rain to Prince Rupert, with between 30 and 90 millimetres in other coastal areas.

There is also a concern about flooding in inland areas of the north coast. Environment Canada said there is a “high likelihood” that rivers could swell due to rain and snowmelt.

 ** 

Dozens of volunteers were on the ground in Merritt on Sunday conducting a damage assessment of homes in the flood-ravaged community.

An estimated 7,000 residents were evacuated from the city, some due to flooding, and others because the city’s drinking and wastewater systems were rendered inoperable by the flood.

** 

The death toll from the devastating mudslides in British Columbia climbed to four on Saturday after police recovered three more bodies from one particularly hard-hit area in the southern part of the province.

The RCMP announced the recoveries in a morning statement, though noted the bodies of the three men were recovered earlier in the week.

The Mounties said the men were found in an area east of Agassiz along Highway 7 and a section of Highway 99, known as the Duffy Lake Road.

The discovery comes days after a woman’s body was recovered near the same area on Monday.

**

A large fire that was burning in Abbotsford, B.C. on Wednesday morning has now been extinguished, local police confirm.

** 

The economic toll of cutting off the Port of Vancouver from the rest of the country, at a time when supply chain disruptions are already biting hard, is going to be gigantic. Economist Trevor Tombe did some quick math and estimated it at over $2 billion a week in trade between B.C. and the rest of the country that's just been wiped off the national GDP, not to mention the direct costs of actually fixing the damaged infrastructure, of repairing property damaged or destroyed by the tragedy and, sadly, and the massive losses to farmers in property and livestock, much of which has drowned. This is a big, big economic hit to Canada.

** 

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said a limit of 30 litres of fuel per visit to a gas station is an important step to maintaining the supply as the province works to bring in more gas by truck and barge from Alberta, Washington state, Oregon and California.

He said the order would apply for 10 to 11 days and he trusts that people won’t be greedy while keeping critical services in mind as they focus on residents whose communities have been devastated by flooding.

 

(Sidebar: there is no one more greedy than the government and the Lotuslanders who would see tax money diverted for heroin and Albertan oil left in the ground.)

Never let a siphoning opportunity go to waste:

British Columbia flooding has added “an element of urgency” to the proposed introduction of a national insurance plan, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said yesterday. The proposal affecting a million homeowners on flood plains across Canada has been under consideration for two years: “Canada is the only G7 country without a national coordinated approach to flooding.”

 

Let's trust the government to spend money wisely!:

An internal audit of Canada’s department of foreign affairs found paperwork was missing in about 33% of sampled files from 2020, reports Blacklock’s Reporter — also finding that many managers tasked with checking up on projects had little knowledge of what became of taxpayers’ money.

One such case studying foreign aid dollars involved supposedly unspent portions of a $20.5 million, four-year commitment to help the Philippines recover from Typhoon Yolanda in 2013 that, according to auditors, was used instead to buy karaoke machines.

Another audit uncovered reports from staff responsible for foreign aid to Afghanistan stating they were under pressure to spend money there — expenditures managers said weren’t having an appreciable impact.

 

 

Was this preventable?:

Dikes that were breached in Abbotsford this week following a massive rainstorm were predicted to fail years ago.

Indeed, a consultant’s report found that most of the sample of dikes surveyed in the Lower Mainland were vulnerable to failure.

The failures of a 100-metre section and a second, smaller section at Cole Road of the Sumas Lake reclamation dike in Abbotsford have exacerbated the flooding in the community of 150,000 in the Fraser Valley.

A temporary replacement is being built in place of the 100-metre failure in order to prevent the flow of more water into Sumas Prairie, an area of farms with a population of about 3,000. Sumas Lake was drained in the 1920s to create much of the farmland.

** 

British Columbia MPs yesterday compared severe flood damage in their province to a long-feared catastrophic earthquake. Insured losses to date are unknown but will run to the billions, said MPs: “We have heard for many years that we are going to have a big earthquake one day and the Lower Mainland could be cut off from the rest of the province. Well, that just happened.”