Western Canada: B.C. begins gas rationing, travel restrictions as flood damage disrupts highways and pipelines

Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.

The B.C. government has introduced gas rationing for large swaths of the province, issuing orders late Friday afternoon that prevent motorists from buying more than 30 litres of fuel at a time and requiring people to stay off the roads for anything other than essential travel.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said the measures are necessary because a shutdown of the Trans Mountain Pipeline due to flood damage has choked supplies. The disaster has also left critical highways unpassable, making getting extra shipments of fuel by other means into the province difficult. Mr. Farnworth said his government and Ottawa are working together to bring in fuel supplies by truck and barge from Alberta, Washington State, Oregon and California.

After 19 months of crisis – starting with the pandemic, then a deadly heat wave in late June, followed by ravaging wildfires and then this week’s ruinous floods – the gas rationing felt like something close to the measures taken during wartime. With three states of emergency declared in the province in 2021, no one has been spared the impact and thousands and thousands of people have been devastated. Some 14,000 people remain under evacuation orders in several communities and 4,700 people have registered for provincial assistance after fleeing their homes, Mr. Farnworth said. At least one person has died in a mudslide triggered by the torrential rain and four others are missing.

The flooding has been especially damaging in the fertile Fraser Valley. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said Friday 954 farms are on evacuation order and another 164 are on alert. Dozens of veterinarians are tending to sick animals and thousands of animals have died.

Globe reporters across the country have been looking at the crisis this week, using specialized knowledge gained from beat reporting in the areas of environment, business and politics, to name a few. Environment reporter Kathryn Blaze Baum led a team of colleagues to take a close look at why this week’s disaster – in a province used to heavy rains in November – was beyond anything experienced in the past.

As she writes, it’s perhaps easy for laypeople to connect climate change to fires: high temperatures dry out vegetation, creating tinder-like conditions. But scientists will tell you that flooding and mudslides are also part of the cascade of climate-change disasters. With wildfires come changes to the soil and vegetation that can exacerbate the effects of heavy rainfall. Lytton, the Fraser Canyon village that hit 49.6 degrees and then went up in flames, is a case in point: Stretches of the highway near the village were shut down in recent months because of post-wildfire mudslides or the threat of them.

While weather is naturally variable, events such as extreme heat, wildfires and flooding will become more frequent and more intense because of climate change. All of Canada is vulnerable for different reasons and in different ways. And nowhere is adequately prepared.

Most infrastructure across the country was built for a world we no longer live in. Emergency medical systems could easily become overwhelmed in the face of a sudden and widespread calamity. Weather-alert systems need to be adapted to properly communicate the severity of an event at precisely the right time.

“One of the lessons of what happened this week is that the climate is changing faster than we can adapt,” said University of British Columbia climate scientist Simon Donner. “We’re not ready for this.”

Feature writer Nancy Macdonald has a powerful first-person essay today on that theme. Like most reporters, she found writing about her own experiences awkward. But Nancy has been a horrified witness to the tragic weather events of this year. On Monday afternoon, as she stood near where the water was rising on the Sumas Prairie, swallowing cars, farmhouses and barns, she stopped her vehicle.

“Adrenalin was ripping through me like a drug. I had been driving through cold, brown water so deep I couldn’t see the road beneath me. Both shoulders had disappeared beneath the waves, so I couldn’t pull over. I was searching for higher ground. But I kept hitting water,” she wrote.

“I finally stopped to snap a photo with my SLR camera in the middle of a road reduced to a single lane. That’s when I saw the last one I’d taken, three months prior, during one of B.C.’s worst fire seasons on record. The sky it depicted – near Princeton, east of where I was standing now – was orange. It was afternoon, but thick smoke had so darkened the day it tripped my flash.”

The experience of the bookended disasters brought Nancy back to her own tragedy, also climate-triggered.

“My dad, Neil James Macdonald, died the day after we evacuated our home on the Red River during what became known in Manitoba as the “flood of the century.” Likely, the ‘97 flood, triggered by a freak April blizzard, was an early harbinger of the changing climate. Two more historic floods followed, until we stopped calling them unprecedented,” Nancy writes.

“On the day he died, my dad, who was known for his sharp wit and full-bodied laugh, managed to talk his way through the RCMP barricade in the evacuation zone. He had gone back for my bike. On the way out, he was felled by a massive heart attack. He was 49.”

I urge you to read the essay in full.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.