BC flood funding: A year after disaster, no protection upgrade answers

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MERRITT — A year after his home in Merritt was nearly washed away by raging flood waters on the Coldwater River, Bob Marcelet stands at the edge of his restored backyard, emotions still running high, wondering what a climate-changed future might bring.

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Marcelet, his wife and teenage son had to be airlifted from their home and he believed at the time they would likely never return.

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Dirt from 70 dump truck loads has replaced his yard, which was stripped away to the edge of his deck when a new river channel was carved out during the flood.

Young men from the Christian humanitarian aid group Samaritan’s Purse  — who Marcelet cannot praise enough — dug out his basement from mud and debris.

That allowed him to pull out the drywall and insulation in his basement and begin restoration.

It’s been slow work and stressful because Marcelet, who works at the regional district’s landfill, has still been unable to get an answer on whether he is eligible for flood-recovery funding.

And bigger questions remain.

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What happens now to properties like his that are on the flood plain in this B.C. Interior community? Will there be a plan to buy them out and will the city be able to improve flood protection?

“I’d like to stay,” said Marcelet, a decades-long resident who favours raising and strengthening the dikes. “But we need some answers.”

Costly repairs

For Merritt, a year after the deadly floods, there are no answers yet to these big questions.

The community of 7,100 — whose industries include tourism, forestry, ranching and mining — cannot afford the cost of significantly increased flood protection.

An initial plan calls for improving dikes and setting others back to create a bigger channel for flood waters, and potentially buying out some properties, at an estimated total cost of $165 million.

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The plan encompasses flood protection on the Coldwater River and another river in town, the Nicola.

The city has a tax base of just $9 million.

Even before the city was able to put in a request for federal funding to the Disaster and Mitigation Adaptation Fund — one of the few sources that will distribute money at the scale they need, tens of millions to an individual community — Merritt officials found out this summer that the program had been closed to new applications.

It’s not clear when or if applications will be reopened or whether Ottawa will be adding more money.

The fund was seeded with a total of $3.375 billion in 2018 and 2021, but $2.2 billion is already spoken for (about 10 per cent in B.C.) and the remaining funding is oversubscribed.

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Sean Strang, Merritt’s deputy director of finance who is on the city’s flood mitigation team, said the city has appreciated the millions of dollars in federal and provincial funding for flood response and recovery costs that have gone to fix roads and water and sewer services, restore dikes, reinforce riverbanks and to build affordable housing.

But the current fixes to dikes do not consider worst-case flood scenarios, which are expected to become more frequent and severe because of climate change.

Strang noted there is a lot of higher-level government money chasing carbon-emission reductions but little for reducing the consequences of climate change.

“There’s no money to prevent the train wreck that is coming at us,” said Strang.

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Merritt is not alone.

Abbotsford, which was hit hard by flooding and has a $2 billion-plus flood protection strategy released last May, had planned to apply for Disaster and Mitigation Adaptation funding but also learned the federal government was not accepting applications. Since then, it has been working directly with the provincial government on its funding needs, said city officials.

Other communities devastated by last year’s flooding, including Princeton and the Okanagan-Similkameen Regional District, are still working on updated flood-protection plans.

Deadly flooding

On a tour of the city, Strang pointed to a recently paved road that had been ripped up in the flooding, restoration of playing fields and a track in a popular park and work completed last summer on the city’s wastewater system.

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Still, a bridge remains out, hanging half over the river bed.

A mobile home swept away in the floods that got caught in the bridge caused part of it to be undermined and collapse.

And while many houses have been repaired, others, including some apartments that provided low-cost housing, sit empty.

More than 130 people remain out of their homes, according to figures provided by the city.

The torrential rains — often called an atmospheric river — that hit southwestern B.C. and parts of the B.C. Interior in mid-November of last year caused deadly flooding that resulted in billions of dollars of damage and displaced 14,000 people.

In Merritt, the entire city had to evacuate on Nov. 15 after the wastewater treatment plant became inoperable.

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The largest water flow level ever was recorded on the Coldwater River, 150 per cent higher than the previous peak.

The city’s proposed flood-protection enhancements are meant to add another one-third buffer on top of the new high flow mark.

The outgoing mayor, Linda Brown, and city officials have tried to make their case to Ottawa and B.C., arguing that spending on flood protection will reduce or eliminate the response and recovery costs of these events, estimated at $150 million for Merritt.

Incoming mayor Mike Goetz will take up that mantle.

On a sunny, crisp fall day, he stands on a repaired dike alongside the Coldwater River.

He points to a spot where a large cottonwood was uprooted and the dike was damaged and broke. There are many more cottonwoods along the dike.

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The top of the dike used to be paved and now is topped with gravel.

Goetz is clear that the temporary fixes cannot be left like this.

“How much do you really want to spend? If you don’t take care of it now, it’s going to cost you even more,” says Goetz. “This isn’t a joke. Global warming is real.”

Goetz experienced the flood firsthand as his home was in an area where there was two-thirds of a metre of water. When he was able to come back, he said it looked like a war zone.

In his backyard, the mud contained bits of charcoal, indicating to him that the forest fires in the river’s watershed that year had played a role in the size of the flood. Experts note that recently burned areas do not absorb water and it increases runoff. Rapid snow melt also contributed.

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While showing what the flood did to his neighbourhood — and pointing out houses and apartments that remain empty — Goetz received a message that B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth’s office wanted to talk to him.

Goetz said he will be making Merritt’s case to Ottawa and B.C. strongly.

“I intend to be a thorn in their side,” he said.

Unanswered questions

In response to questions from Postmedia, neither the federal nor B.C. government answered on whether funding at the levels needed to build flood resiliency in Merritt or Abbotsford would be available.

Infrastructure Canada, which has responsibility for the Disaster and Mitigation Adaptation Fund, did not answer questions on whether the program will reopen to applications or if more money will be added.

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In a written response, Infrastructure Canada spokesman Zoltan Csepregi noted that the intake for large projects in 2021 closed on Oct. 15 and for small projects on Nov. 15.

There was no mention of opening applications in 2022 or 2023.

In an email, Csepregi pointed to other climate resiliency programs, but the largest, the green infrastructure program, requires spending of up to 27 per cent from local governments, which for Merritt’s $165-million plan would be $44 million, funds the community does not have.

And only the Disaster and Mitigation Adaptation program allows the purchase of land, needed if homes are to be moved and dikes set back.

In a written response, B.C. Forests Ministry spokesman Nigel McInnis said the province “continues dialogue with the federal government who we anticipate will cost share flood mitigation projects and assist with building back better.”

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In an email, McInnis pointed to a new B.C.-federal shared $81.8-million program to protect communities from floods, but municipalities and First Nations are only eligible for up to $10 million.

Jason Thistlewaite, a University of Waterloo professor who studies climate-change adaptation, said the federal government is largely missing in action on the climate adaptation front, other than offering some meagrely funded grant programs.

He said the Disaster and Mitigation Adaptation Fund is still important because unlike response and recovery programs, it is designed to adapt to and reduce the consequences of disasters such as floods.

“You need a program to address (adaptation) with a longer-term outlook. And it’s just something we don’t do very well,” said Thistlewaite.

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He said that Canada may need to consider creating an agency akin to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the U.S., more commonly known as FEMA, which has an annual budget, some of which is earmarked for pre-disaster mitigation programs.

It has independence and consistent year-to-year financing, unlike the Canadian programs that receive intermittent funding, said Thistlewaite.

Home swept away

On a late October day, the Coldwater River is slow moving and is more a creek than a river. You would get your feet wet, but it would take just three or four step to cross.

About two kilometres upstream from Marcelet’s home there’s a line of green-mesh, gravel-filled gabion diking put in place during the flooding.

They sit well above the street, which was also flooded, where Gary Herrington lives with his wife.

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This is the location where the mobile home that hit the bridge was swept away.

Herrington showed a map on his cellphone and a line indicating how much land was eaten away during the flood, maybe as much as 100 feet.

Herrington would also like to stay and, like Marcelet, would like to see the dikes raised.

Even though he was there to see it, he still remains incredulous over how high and how fast the water rose.

Those are things you watch on TV — it doesn’t happen to you, said Herrington, a 42-year resident of Merritt, retired now after working at Highland Valley Copper.

“I know it’s big bucks,” said Herrington. “But let’s not wait until the next one.”

ghoekstra@postmedia.com

twitter.com/gordon_hoekstra

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