Evading one crisis after another
It feels like the end of the world these days in B.C. But it’s only the beginning
Surely, by mid-November we could settle in for winter after a long, smoky summer marked by fire and drought.
That was, at least, my thought before biblical floods washed out highways and plunged whole towns underwater in an “atmospheric river” event.
As I write this, almost 20,000 people have been displaced across British Columbia, with four people confirmed dead and more fatalities expected to be tallied in the coming days.
Vancouver, the province’s biggest city and a crucial economic port, is cut off from highway access. Power outages are widespread. Grocery store shelves are barren across southern B.C. as desperate people hoard what they can, echoing the first days of the pandemic in March 2020, which now feel like a lifetime ago.
The military has arrived to help.
Experts say it could take weeks to even start fixing several major highways that dramatically collapsed under torrential rains, sliding into an abyss that seemed to emerge from the underworld. It’s not just that towns such as Princeton and Merritt are underwater, but the escape routes are gone, too — the bedrock of human connection across Canada.
Premier John Horgan declared a state of emergency Wednesday. But for many residents, it’s starting to seem as if “emergency” is the province’s natural state.
I’ve lived in B.C. for barely more than a year and spent about half of it dodging climaterelated disasters.
Before leaving Edmonton to live and work on a farm in the South Okanagan last fall, I had mostly grappled with climate change as a theoretical problem. I read about droughts in California. I saw wildfire evacuees come in from Fort McMurray and Slave Lake. I knew rising temperatures and sea levels were ravaging countries in other parts of the world.
But it was not until Mount Law caught fire just across the highway from the farm where I lived in Peachland, B.C., close enough to see flames engulf individual trees one by one, that climate change became visceral, became real.
We were put on evacuation alert for several days, constantly on edge and wondering when the winds might shift and send flames dancing over the highway. Helicopters started using the hay field as a daily helicopter landing pad, a base camp to fight surrounding fires.
More than 1,600 wildfires torched almost 8,700 square kilometres of land across B.C. last spring and summer, triggering 181 evacuations orders and 304
evacuation alerts starting in April. The province was in a state of emergency from late July to mid-September, and fires continued to burn into October. The government spent about $565 million fighting them.
The particularly devastating fire season — still somehow not as bad as 2017 — was sparked by drought and a vicious “heat dome” that set record-breaking temperatures and killed almost 600 people. Lytton burned to the ground in June after hitting 50 C, as if the mercury burst and incinerated the whole town in minutes.
At its peak, escape seemed impossible. Fires burned in every direction through the southern interior. Farm work became futile in the afternoons, when sweltering heat was compounded by thick, grey smoke. What I had long considered one of the most beautiful places in the world, a tourist hot spot for its expansive lakes and mesmerizing high-desert landscape, looked and felt like hell.
The heat caused crops to shrivel or ripen prematurely. Families of black bears, also displaced by fires, made their homes on the farm, devouring the melon patch and picking off fruit trees.
Farmers across B.C. suffered catastrophic losses, with more than 650,000 farm animals succumbing to the heat in addition to lost crops.
In October, just as fire season cooled off, my partner and I relocated to a remote off-grid cabin in the South Shuswap, twoand-a-half hours northeast of the farm.
When a faulty generator left us without power on the weekend, we sat by candlelight, a raging fire safely contained within our wood stove, as news of the floods reached our phones. I felt ironic solidarity with people in cities who were also suddenly in the dark, isolated and without power.
Heavy logging and wildfires have robbed B.C.’s forests of their natural ability to mitigate flooding.
It’s a vicious cycle that will not reverse, barring immediate, unapologetic climate action and a miraculous reversal of global temperatures. Days after the conclusion of the UN Climate Change conference, that seems unlikely.
As I write this, safe from the floods, snow falls steadily and builds on the ground outside. The grim Canadian winter will soon turn water to ice, wreaking havoc on sopping infrastructure.
It is hard not to feel despondent, without hope for a brighter future. The thought of having to narrowly evade one crisis after another ad infinitum is agonizing.
It sometimes feels like the end of the world out here, but the jarring reality is this is only the beginning.