On November 17, 2021, a weather bomb destroyed a small portion of the Canadian province of British Columbia. This significant weather event sent experts and officials scrambling to save the Fraser Valley from being the Canadian equivalent of Atlantis. During this time, there were stories of heroes saving livestock and lives in a time of need. The more significant story is that these types of storms may become more common. Read on to learn more about the B.C floods, and the dikes that will be tested again in this edition of the Seventh Estate.

Before that fateful day, on the ninth of November, Environment Canada issued a snowfall warning for the B.C interior. Two days later, Northern Washington did the same, but with a flood warning. Shortly after, Environment Canada changed their forecast to 150mm of rain, the equivalent of 15cm. Soon, the forecast became so serious that the air raid sirens in Washington started to go off to warn people about the floods. Some people heard it on the Canadian side of the border and took to Facebook to warn others about the impending rainfall. Interestingly, the province had earlier enacted legislation that made it the municipality’s job to inform people of impending disasters, even though the province does have better capacity and resources to do that. That day, an atmospheric river, literally a river in the sky, that stretched 100km long, made landfall. Massive destruction ensued. During the floods, the region of Fraser Valley was most affected, mostly because of the valley.

One town, Abbotsford, was actually a lake that B.C drained to make space for farmland.

The pump house in Abbotsford would have been obliterated if not for 200 volunteers who piled sandbags to block the water away from the pump.

Outside of the Fraser Valley, people who were fleeing the water were clogging up the highways out of the valley. Suddenly, there was a mudslide that washed away many of the fleeing citizens’ cars. The water also destroyed multiple sections of multiple highways and roads, causing them to collapse. In other towns that were hit less, city officials were still forced to make tough choices due to the floods crippling their infrastructure.