Western Canada: B.C. takes stock of the scale of flooding devastation

Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.

Sometimes, the scale of a disaster can be laid bare with a simple list.

Almost three weeks after torrential rains prompted catastrophic flooding, some of the numbers are becoming clear. Nearly 15,000 residents have been displaced by the floods. Three major highways are broken, and one secondary highway, Hwy. 8, is mostly obliterated. About 628,000 chickens are dead, along with 420 dairy cattle and 12,000 hogs. Beehives submerged: 110. Farms under evacuation order: 819. Blueberry crops underwater and likely destroyed: 700 acres.

The biggest number of all, the total cost of the damage, has not yet been tallied. Transportation Minister Rob Fleming would only venture an estimate of “a lot.”

The Globe’s U.S. correspondent, Nathan VanderKlippe, had another interesting number this week: $29-million.

That’s what it would have cost to install a levee extension in Washington State that could have prevented or at least lessened the flooding from the Nooksack River. The river, as Nathan writes, is a sediment-laden ribbon behind tree-lined banks that keep it from spilling into northern Washington State. But when rain is heavy or snow-melt fast, the river spills near the town of Everson, pouring through dairy barns and blueberry fields on its way to the lower ground north: Abbotsford’s Sumas Prairie.

For the $29-million that it would have cost Washington State, damages to the Abbotsford area would be cut by more than $500-million, according to a flood-mitigation plan delivered to the City of Abbotsford just last year.

The price tag for that Nooksack levee work is less than a tenth the cost of flood prevention alternatives on the Canadian side, which include raising dikes and tunnelling a runoff channel through a mountain. And addressing the problem on the U.S. side would provide “the highest benefit when looking only at Canada-side damages,” the report says.

But flood planners in the United States have done no studies of such an option. “We hadn’t gotten there yet,” Dave Radabaugh, Washington’s National Flood Insurance Program Co-ordinator, said in an interview.

And despite years of anger over the inability to resolve a major cross-border problem, there has never been a formal call to involve a century-old U.S.-Canada commission designed specifically to draft solutions to such issues.

The International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canada body, was established by a 1909 treaty to investigate solutions to cross-border water issues when it is commissioned to do so by federal governments. The IJC has been used after other disasters, such as the Red River floods in 1997. But despite informal inquiries from B.C. in the early 1990s, it has “never received direction from the Governments of Canada and the United States to engage in the Nooksack-Sumas flooding issue,” said Paul Allen, a manager with the commission.

The B.C. government confirmed it has not requested IJC involvement.

Those choices will no doubt have to be examined in the months and years ahead. But for now, residents across British Columbia are focused on recovery.

Much of the work will be done for free: countless hours of volunteer labour have already been committed, as Justine Hunter writes this weekend.

She tells the story of Shaun Heaps, who has been organizing dozens of flights to help communities still isolated by the floods and mudslides. He’s managing a fleet of 58 small planes and helicopters, flying into Hope, Lillooet, Chilliwack and Merritt. “We’re just a bunch of regular joes, filling a gap that needs to be filled and hoping that the government will step in.”

Cody Parsons isn’t part of an organized relief effort. Even so, he drove 240 kilometres to the town of Princeton, where he offered his plumbing and gas-fitting services for free to people whose basements had filled with turbid water after the Tulameen River began to overflow its banks on Nov. 13.

He said he has been putting in 12-hour days, reconnecting heating where he can and helping homeowners determine what equipment is lost and what might be saved.

When he asked if anyone in town had a spare jacket for Noel, his Staffordshire terrier, Princeton residents overwhelmed him with offers. “Everybody wants to buy me a jacket!” he said.

Volunteer work is not tax deductible, but contributions of money and goods often are. Adam Parachin, an associate professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, who specializes in charity law, noted that Canada’s tax credits for donating to charities are among the most generous in the world.

Corporations may be motivated by the good public relations they can generate with their donations, he said, “but even if it is building a brand or shareholder equity, it doesn’t take away from the good work achieved. We are seeing people come together in moments of crisis.”

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.