Less than two weeks after B.C. was battered by the most destructive floods in its history, the province is making stunning progress at getting back on its feet.
There are now two highway routes open between the Lower Mainland and the rest of the country, the Canadian Pacific Railway has restarted service over the Rocky Mountains and even the Trans-mountain
Pipeline is set to restart operations by week’s end. Here is a gallery of images, all taken by frontline agencies, showing B.C.’S progress at patching up the carnage from Nov. 15.
B.C. MINISTRY OF TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
This is a section of Highway 7 near Agassiz, B.C., about two hours east of Downtown Vancouver. Just one week ago, this highway was the scene of one of the more dramatic evacuations of the B.C. floods. After a line of cars was suddenly stranded by landslides both behind and in front of it, 315 people needed to be pulled to safety by RCAF Cormorant helicopter flights. This is actually one of the less destructive washouts to have stricken a B.C. highway last week, with the road’s surface and foundations remaining relatively unscathed from the tonnes of
material that slammed into it. Even then, restoring the highway to service has been a days-long odyssey of scooping away a mountainside’s worth of muck, rocks and fallen trees.
B.C. MINISTRY OF TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Another badly damaged section of the Coquihalla. The rushing waters of the Coldwater River were powerful enough to strip away the highway’s entire foundations and essentially convert it into a new section of river. Thus, the first
step to restoration is to literally recreate the land by piling up rocks and fill.
ABBOTSFORD POLICE DEPARTMENT
An RCAF crew member is dwarfed by the profile of a CC-177 Globemaster deployed to the Lower Mainland to deliver
helicopters needed for recovery efforts. The massive cargo aircraft was able to transport three Griffon helicopters.
B.C. MINISTRY OF TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
The Coquihalla is indisputably the highway most wrecked by the Nov. 15 floods, with even the most optimistic forecasts predicting that it won’t be restored to service until the spring. This is the Jessica Bridge, located just a few kilometres from the highway’s start point east of Hope, B.C. The Coquihalla is famous for running through some of the most treacherous terrain in Canada, and crews are now faced with the challenge of rebuilding
some of its most difficult sections at the same time.
B.C. MINISTRY OF TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
This panorama worthy of a Renaissance masterpiece
shows a small army of heavy equipment working to restore one of the sections of the Trans-canada Highway
most damaged by the Nov. 15 flooding. Several dozen metres of highway were wiped off the face of the Earth by mudslides, causing the collapse of a rail overpass and
leaving a section of rail tenuously clinging above the destruction. This occurred at Tank Hill, which is ironically only a short drive from Lytton, B.C., the village that was almost completely destroyed by the province’s record-breaking summer wildfires.
ABBOTSFORD POLICE DEPARTMENT
This section of the Trans-canada Highway in Abbotsford, B.C. is relatively typical of the undermining damage that struck many major and minor B.C. roads last week due to heavy rains. Here, the damage is so substantial that
crews have needed to construct a temporary road to shore up the ground around the highway before they can
even begin to consider repaving efforts.