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Opinion: Prime Minister John Horgan said this week’s events had “not been considered before”. Nonsense, we’ve had repeated warnings
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Daphne Bramham Bales of hay floating on a Fraser Valley farm Wednesday taken from a Coquitlam search and rescue helicopter. Photo of Coquitlam SAR Article content
Over the past year, British Columbians have been at the forefront of the grim reality of climate disasters.
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Three provincial emergencies were declared in addition to two public health emergencies – COVID-19 and the opioid overdose epidemic.
At least 599 people have died from climate emergencies – 595 from this summer’s extreme heat, two from forest fires and one so far reported from this week’s flooding, with the toll set to rise once the weather hits. Flood waters retreat and crews search the debris.
Some 17,775 people were evacuated midweek due to the effects of the flooding – British Columbians evacuated farms, towns and villages before the fires and floods. Hundreds more had bags ready to go.
The disasters were epic.
The town of Lytton was wiped out, reduced to ashes as forest fires ravaged an area roughly 1.5 times the size of Prince Edward Island, or nearly 8,700 square kilometers.
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For several days, Vancouver – the third largest city in Canada with one of the busiest ports in North America – was cut off with cut road and rail links. The 7,100 residents of Merritt fled when the water rose.
Thousands of farm animals perished after barns and fields turned into ponds and lakes.
The full economic impact of these disasters will take months to be calculated. It will take much longer to repair critical infrastructure and people’s lives.
All that remains intact during this terrible year is the selfless willingness of the people to help outsiders and the ingenuity they have employed to provide it.
We learned a new language to describe events, from thermal domes to atmospheric rivers, even though we started to run out of words to describe their effects. Unpublished, extraordinary, disastrous, catastrophic lose their descriptive power.
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Soon, we will surely have to lose patience with the political decision-makers who fiddled too long while the province was on the verge of a conflagration to be drowned to the point of drowning.
Why is there no apparently operational warning system? Where are the Canadian Armed Forces helicopters, zodiacs, inflatable rafts, backhoes and other much-needed equipment? Why were farmers and their friends on aluminum boats and Sea-Doos left without proper protection trying to save people and livestock from polluted floodwaters?
It must finally be time to hold policymakers accountable for what they have not done. It must finally be time to insist that what was once unprecedented must be treated with the same resolute urgency as the global pandemic.
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We urgently need plans to deal with the next fires, thermal domes and atmospheric rivers.
The tragedy is that British Columbia started off fairly well.
In 2007, it was the first jurisdiction in North America to introduce a carbon tax in recognition of the fact that Canadians’ per capita emissions are among the highest in the world.
British Columbia has pledged to reduce greenhouse gases by a third by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Other promises ranged from the exemplary to the ridiculous: new investments in clean energy, net zero deforestation, a carbon neutral public sector by 2010 and the greenest Olympics already.
It’s not that anyone believed then or now believes that Canada alone can reduce emissions enough to slow rising temperatures. But at least then British Columbia and Canada were at least trying to lead by example.
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Except that we continued to rearrange the landscapes and the building, and the construction, to accommodate an influx of a million people.
In a decade, things have gone off the rails.
In 2018, the Auditor General reported that climate risks were not being properly managed, that BC’s temperature was rising faster than the global average, and that the province would miss its targets for 2020 and 2050.
In scathing and premonitory comments, Carol Bellringer predicted that the province “may not be able to manage flood risk, as roles and responsibilities are divided among many agencies and levels of government, and that these organizations may not have adequate staff or technical capacity ”.
Forest fire prevention has been described as “insufficient”, “uncoordinated” and has not targeted the areas most at risk.
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Indigenous communities and local governments on the front lines of disasters have suffered from a lack of provincial policies as well as “reliable financial support, data and knowledge”.
No one should take comfort in the fact that every auditor general across the country that year echoed Bellringer’s concerns in their collaborative report.
The Auditor General’s report remains as good a description as any of what happened in British Columbia this year.
“Initial work” on flood strategy and watershed security is among “action highlights” in August draft of BC’s Climate Preparedness and Adaptation Strategy . The same goes for “improving public understanding of forest fire threats and climate change in British Columbia”.
Mother Nature more than took care of both.
It’s a bit late to model a series of scenarios. We have already experienced what Prime Minister John Horgan called this week “extraordinary events. Not measured before, not considered before.
Except that they were being considered. The problem is, nothing has been done to prepare for it. Perhaps naively, more likely hopefully, policymakers believed that disasters couldn’t happen here.
Now we know they can and probably will do it again. There is no excuse for not being ready.
Twitter: @bramham_daphne
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