Front Burner - How a catastrophic climate event unfolded in B.C.

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

British Columbia declared a state of emergency Wednesday after days of extreme flooding and mudslides destroyed major highways and cut off entire communities in parts of the Lower Mainland. Mass evacuations were ordered in places like Merritt, Princeton and parts of Abbotsford, a city of nearly 100,000 people, but the full scale of the devastation still isn't known. These kinds of climate events are becoming all too familiar in B.C. It was just four and a half months ago that a crushing heat dome killed nearly 600 people in the province, and a wildfire burned the town of Lytton to the ground. Today on Front Burner, how this week's weather event, known as an atmospheric river, unfolded, and how other recent extreme climate events may have made it worse. If this is the new normal for B.C., what does the future look like for the people in the province? Finally, a conversation with CBC Vancouver reporter Justin McElroy about how the B.C. government responded and what needs to change moving forward.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett. In some parts of BC, especially along the West Coast, we're very used to the rain.

But even where I live, in Vancouver, we're not used to rain like this. Some places have received a month's worth of rain or more in just two days. Some of the pictures coming in from Merritt are just staggering. You see the town underwater. So I entered the house stupidly, and I looked down the stairs, and all I could see was river, and it was flowing. As of noon today, the government of B.C.

is declaring a state of emergency. The rain was relentless. It pummeled southern BC on Sunday and Monday and broke 20 records across the province. Here in Vancouver, the storm ripped this massive red barge from its mooring and sent it crashing into the seawall. People posted video of patio furniture flying off of 30-story condo towers in Yaletown. Oh my god, that's lawn chairs. That's big, heavy stuff. But compared to other parts of the province, that was nothing.

Breaking news this hour, RCMP in British Columbia confirmed one fatality in a mudslide near Lillooet. The major weather system has also led to the evacuation of an entire city in the BC interior. Thousands were forced to flee Merritt after flooding damaged hundreds of homes and caused the... I thought the more the hill was going to fall and you could see the waterfalls coming in,

you know, I thought, is this going to hit? It sounds cliche, but I really thought, is this the day I'm done? Gone. Just gone. You watched your house float away? It went under. It just, the river just took it under and gone. Within seconds.

within seconds. All our stuff that we've gathered in 20 odd years, some of our animals were in that house. It's all gone. But we're not the only ones. There's so many people out there. If you haven't seen some of these images yourself, it's kind of hard to do them justice.

Parts of Abbotsford and Merritt look like giant lakes. You can see the tops of overturned cars barely poking out from the water, people in boats riding through what used to be city streets, chunks of the Trans-Canada and Coquihalla highways completely broken off and fallen into the water or the mountainside below them. I mean, pieces of these highways are literally missing. Look at this bridge. I mean, pieces of these highways are literally missing. Look at this bridge. There's nothing left of it. And of course, people in distress. Hundreds were trapped in their cars overnight on Sunday after two mudslides blocked them on a rural highway. Rescuers had to use military helicopters to airlift them out.

Basically no way out for us. There's a mountain beside us. Essentially we're surrounded by water and two slides and a huge mountain. So it's becoming a really long day, especially for people that don't have water or food. Another landslide near the town of Lillooet killed at least one woman. And as of Wednesday afternoon, others are still missing. There are a lot of evacuations. The entire city of Merritt was forced out on Monday. Not just because parts of the city were completely underwater,

but because the sewage treatment plant flooded, which officials called an immediate danger to public health and safety. This morning, Diana Boston waded through flood waters to get her family and pets to safety. I was frozen already. I was like, I was on the verge of hyperventilating or whatever you call it, getting too cold and I couldn't barely even function. Inside, I'm tearing apart. On the outside, I have to stay strong. Like I said, I have my daughter and my pets, and they can feel when you're getting sad or upset or agitated. The whole town of Princeton had to evacuate too.

So did parts of Abbotsford, a city of nearly 150,000 people. of nearly 150,000 people. There are some amazing stories of rescue, like Laura Ronson, a nurse stuck between the landslides on Highway 7. She helped save a family whose van had fallen over a cliff. I tried to call my mom, and then a man comes out of the bush, and he's all covered in mud and blood, and he's screaming, I need help. I immediately went into, I guess, fight or flight mode and I got some boots

borrowed from a gentleman because I was wearing slip-ons. I went down the side of the mountain, I think it was about 30 feet down where they were trapped. Thankfully, they were all alive inside and they were all breathing and they were all safe enough. And then there's Henry Chilohitsia in Merritt. He and his friends used a motorboat to help wrangle a stranger's horses. I mean, a whole team of horses through water that was nearly two meters deep. And then there's this wild video from Abbotsford of community members using a hovercraft and a jet ski to help farmers pull their cows through floodwaters. These floods and landslides have also meant major infrastructure problems. At one point on Monday, more than 100,000 BC Hydro customers were without power.

The Trans Mountain Pipeline, the only pipeline carrying oil from Alberta to BC, has been temporarily shut down. And so have the highways and rail lines that connect the lower mainland, including the port of Vancouver, to the rest of the country. There's nothing left in the store. The panic is playing out on grocery store shelves as people rush to stock up, unsure how long the major routes will be closed. The province says it's possible... One of the most painful parts of this for many people here in BC is just how familiar these kinds of extreme climate events are becoming. It's just four and a half months since the heat dome

that killed nearly 600 people here. We are breaking all-time Canada temperature records. You mentioned 46.6 in Lytton. Just incredible that we could break that again over the consecutive days. Right now, health officials say the risk of extreme heat exposure is higher than COVID-19. And since fires burned the entire town of Lytton to the ground. COVID-19. And since fires burned the entire town of Lytton to the ground. As people fled for their lives, the fear was there would be nothing to return to. And the devastating images today show for many that is the reality. About 90% of the community. There's this surreal moment in an

interview my colleague Brady Strachan did this week with a couple in Merritt. Alex Watson and his partner Jessica DeWitt watched as water streamed into their kitchen early this morning. Heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking. Because you can't do anything about it. Nothing. At least with the fires, we kind of had a chance. You could come out with the hose and try to... That was only three months ago, like... Yeah. And to this extreme, and our house is...

That's the thing. The whole city was on evacuation alert just in August. And most summers recently, there's been big fires close to Merritt. I know it's a cliche, but this feels like the new normal in this province. One where extreme weather, brought on by climate change is happening now and not in 2030 or 2050, like right now. And of course, the need for urgent action was what left many frustrated with Saturday's watered-down climate pact at the UN's COP26 climate conference. The end result, an intensely negotiated agreement that at best achieves incremental progress and ultimately falls short for everyone.

For everyone. It's what we've known was going to happen with climate change scientists telling us what to look forward to in the projections. And so without attributing this particular event to climate change, we already know that it is likely affected by climate change and that we're going to see... That's Armel Castellan. He's a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment Canada. And he told FrontBurner that the impacts of this week's weather event, which is what's known as an atmospheric river, have actually been made worse by our other extreme climate events, the heat domes, the droughts, the fires that have scarred BC's forests. What does multi-year drought, multi-year big record-breaking fire years have to do with the wet season that we're currently in? And the answer is that those

type of multi-year and even just this last summer was so extreme that the soils are affected and become hydrophobic so they don't retain moisture the same way so those first rains on that kind of soil have higher runoff and we saw slides there's the the burn scars that are going to add susceptibility to how an atmospheric river might affect a certain region so those kind of worst case scenarios are just more and more likely to happen and that they're linked, absolutely they're linked. Ecology is not... And this revolving door of worst case scenario after worst case scenario means when people are fleeing their homes to escape one crisis, they don't know if they might just be walking into another. To give you an idea, this summer, one of the

places where people from Lytton sought shelter after the fire was Merritt. Now, people in Merritt are evacuating to cities like Salmon Arm and Kelowna, places with their own histories of floods and fires. Basically, when you say the term climate displacement or climate migration, people automatically think internationally. People often think about low-lying island nations or Bangladeshis or the migrant caravan coming out of Central America, right? This idea... Frontburner also spoke to Nicole Bates-Yemer. She's finishing a PhD at the University of Victoria about climate displacement, and she does research with an organization called

the Climate Displacement Planning Initiative. You know, people are being displaced here in BC. This is not something that is just happening out there. This is also happening here. And we need to understand this as something that Canadians are affected by. And I think that then connects Canadians to the bigger picture of what's going on from climate change. Bates-Emer says when you hear the word evacuation,

you usually think of it as something very short term. But that's not always what's happening here. Linking that to people being in hotels for two or three years afterwards, that anecdotally that has happened or anecdotally people are on the streets of Kamloops who lost their trailer in the wildfire or the trailer park burned home and they had nowhere to go. And so we really, I think, you know, as a province and as politicians, we need to start accepting that that is what is going on. And how do we then prepare communities to be inclusive and safe and welcoming, just like we would if we were thinking about it happening from people coming from somewhere else. So that's a really big question, which we definitely can't answer today. But I do want to turn now to talking more about politicians and their responsibilities here.

I'm speaking to Justin McElroy, municipal affairs reporter for CBC Vancouver, about the many questions being lobbied at the BC government around the response to this crisis and the broader questions facing all levels of government about what needs to change moving forward. I'll see you next time. through Angel Investment and Industry Connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Hi, Justin. Hi, Angela. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm so glad you're with us for this conversation. And I mean, I guess I just wanted to ask you, first off, you know, both you and I were either covering or keeping our eyes on, you know, both the wildfires that really ravaged our province this summer. And as well as this, you know, this this flooding that's just overwhelmed our province once again. flooding that's just overwhelmed our province once again. I'm just wondering, you know,

as a reporter in BC, what's it been like to watch two of these kind of climate disasters unfold right in front of your eyes? A lot of existential dread, right? Like, it's sort of a here we go again. And the fact that we seem helpless to be able to stop these things happening and them happening within five months of each other, the biggest wildfire disaster we've seen in several decades and now the biggest flooding disaster we've seen in several decades. We're much more prepared to report on these things now. But in terms of just what it means for the future and we're like everyone else sort of wondering, is this the new normal? And if it is, what does that mean? And it's sort of terrifying to think about. But you also have to think in the moment of, all right, how can we do better? And how can we talk to people about how this is impacting them?

And so I want to talk about the province, the province's response to this historic storm. So let's start from the beginning. As this started to unfold over the weekend, what was the initial response like from the provincial government? Frankly, not much at first. So there was a warning given for another atmospheric river. There has been so much rain. There's a term for it. It's called an atmospheric river.

That the province was going to experience. And that warning was given on Friday. And it said that the peak would be sometime on Sunday. But we've had a lot of these warnings in British Columbia. And rain happens a lot. And I think a lot of people, including the government's own messaging, didn't really heighten the risk and immediacy of this. Then on Sunday morning, a few meteorologists started looking at the models and said, it's basically certain that we're going to get as much rain in one day as places can have in a month sometimes. And this could be a serious flooding event.

But it wasn't until one or two in the afternoon that the province really started to put out warnings telling people don't go on highways if you don't have to. It wasn't until a few hours after that that the highways were actually closed. It wasn't until a few hours after that that the highways were actually closed and it fell completely evacuated at 7,000 people, or Princeton where there was heavy flooding and there's about 1,500 people, there is way less that you can do in the moment when this starts. And so now that the government is in place and working with search and rescue crews from the federal government as well, people have been evacuated from where they need to have been. government as well. People have been evacuated from where they need to have been. But there are still lots of questions people are having, especially around the lack of the province using the emergency alert system, which all provinces have, which British Columbia has never used in the three years that it's been implemented, unlike every other province in the country. And people wondering, if not something like this, when would you use it? Right. And I know that there was also criticism, like if you knew how catastrophic this was going

to be, why didn't you shut down parts of the highway, for example. What other criticism have you heard around this? Or what have you heard in terms of the public response to the way that the provincial government responded or didn't respond, especially from those who have been severely impacted by the flooding? Well, I think what informs a lot of both the criticism, but also just the exhaustiveness and anxiety of people is the heat dome in the summer. Approximately 600 people across the province died as a result of heat stroke or other medical conditions that happened in the peak of this gigantic rise in temperature over three or four days. And everyone knew that this rise in temperature was going to happen. And the province didn't act quickly enough in the eyes of a lot of people to warn what was happening,

to get people out of their homes if there wasn't adequate ventilation. The premier sort of infamously saying, as Dr. Henry said, fatalities are part of life and the consequences or the causes of those fatalities are examined by officials that we put in place. only seeming to really put out the full cavalry to put resources in after the fact makes people frustrated and makes people wonder what we have learned and what we'll continue to learn if we continue to have climate emergencies like this. What was the provincial government's response to not issuing the province-wide text alert in this case. What did they say in their defense? They said that it wasn't a silver bullet and that's true, but it is one tool in a toolkit for everyone to know about a situation. They also said that they would look at using it in the future.

But there's also some irony that on Wednesday, there was a Canada-wide test of this system that was going to go out. It didn't go out in British Columbia because they had to cancel it in BC because they thought people would be confused about a test alert when a real emergency is happening despite the government not using that alert for the real thing. not using that alert for the real thing. It is a situation I think the province has acknowledged that they will be looking at. That being said, you know, an alert doesn't stop 250 millimeters of rain in one place. It doesn't stop these landslides. It doesn't stop this catastrophic damage to highways. So there are several elements of what could have been done here and just how

much impact more warning would have had that people do need to keep in mind when they assess what more, quote, could have been done. Is this becoming a new normal in BC? And if so, what does that mean for people who live in these very now vulnerable areas? mean for people who live in these very now vulnerable areas? You know, that was the theme of, I traveled around BC a little bit this summer and spoke to a lot of people who lived in small towns. And I asked, what can you do specifically to stop this? Or can you? And they said, you know, we can do more disaster mitigation. We can map out our floodplains better. We can let everyone know about that. We can do more disaster mitigation. We can map out our floodplains better.

We can let everyone know about that. We can clear brush in the winter and spring so that wildfires are a little bit less of a threat. Having said that, if these disasters are so big and the scope of them are so big, there's only so much that can be done. You ask people, are you going to leave? People love their homes. Everyone goes to their little slice of heaven in British Columbia for their community and loves it and doesn't want to have that change. But people are starting to recognize that this has a possibility of happening not just once every 100 years as we hear that forecasting phrase a lot, but once every 20 or 10 or even more. Broadcasting prays a lot, but once every 20 or 10 or even more. And I think people are still wrapping their heads around the reality of what that means to the DNA of a community.

I want to talk about a group of people that have been very vulnerable to both the fires, the flooding and the heat dome. They're Indigenous people. There's Indigenous communities all over the province that have been hit particularly hard by these climate disasters, but in very different ways. So we heard from one woman living in Kamloops, Anna Thomas, whose uncle and cousin are now stranded in Lytton First Nation, which as you know, was also devastated by the fire in the summer, which we've been talking about. You know, we're worrying about my uncle to make sure he has enough. Well, my uncle and my cousins, because they live together. It's just this constant living in, like, does it ever end? You know, it always feels, personally, as an Indigenous person, we're always in crisis mode. You're dealing with the fires, the wildfires,

you're dealing with, amongst that, all the other social stuff that is happening in our communities. She told us that the issue here for these communities is not only financial, but it impacts their way of life. I'm just thinking about food sovereignty, right? If you've harvested wild meat and now you have no way of saving it, now you have nothing and that's what happened with Lytton. You know, you look at the wildfires and the floods, what it does to the, what we call the medicine bowls, like spots where you'd go pick traditional medicine

or spots where you'd go have your traditional hunting camps. Like, it's huge. What does this situation right now look like for First Nations communities in BC? It's a situation much like a lot of smaller municipalities where you have less resources to directly affect things, but with the added burden of there being a less often formalized relationship with higher levels of government. And we've seen in wildfire seasons over the past three or four years, stories about First Nations saying that we reached out to the government and we didn't hear in time or it was difficult to have that basic communication around emergencies. So it's part of the reason why people who are studying these disasters and saying what

can be done on a local level more, emphasizing a regional approach because these communities are all in this together. And also too often we're in a situation where the government is sort of triaging with a whole bunch of different groups and some get left by the wayside. And for a variety of reasons, First Nation communities are often part of that being left behind. I mean, given what we've seen all of this year when it comes to these disasters in B.C., what do you think needs to be happening right now? It's funny to be using these or using these terms and hearing these terms that used to be hypothetical to us in British Columbia, like climate refugees, and now we're seeing thousands of people trapped in communities like Hope right now, which is trapped between several mudslides.

There's about 1,000 visitors to town living in gyms and homes, not knowing when any of the roads will be reopened for them to get back to their communities. Many of the roads will be reopened for them to get back to their communities. This is something that all levels of government need to start really addressing and going, what is our plan if key highways are blocked by mudslides or completely torn asunder for several days, weeks, months at a time? Given the lack of certainty and answers that people are having right now to these questions in British Columbia I'm not sure that we have those answers and one would hope that we really take a clear look at having slightly firmer words that we can give people when these situations

occur in the future. Justin thank you so much for this always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks, Angela. That's it for FrontBurner for today. I'm Angela Starrett, in for Jamie Poisson. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.