13 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

  2. The 1948 floods were in June and the result of the late lasting snow pack all melting in a heat wave. There were similar floods on the Columbia River that did a lot of damage in Trail, and this led to the construction of dams on the Kootenay River and the Arrow Lakes.

    In the case of the Fraser River some improvements were made to dikes but it was felt that the 1948 spring flood was not likely to repeat for centuries so it faded out of memory for the current generation. There was a minor repeat in 1972 but the water didn’t get anywhere near that high.

    This autumn heavy rainfall situation seems to be about as large a deviation from previous extremes as the 1948 flood (rainfall in the central interior played a role in that but not closer to the coast, they were just in the path of all the water that collected hundreds of miles upstream). However, that’s only true of the one event, in fact there have been months with higher rainfall totals than we are likely to see in this current November. The rain was spread out into three or four events that were (barely) handled by the drainage systems although there were localized problems, for example, on Oct 28, 1981 a section of the Sea to Sky highway washed out (back in the days when that road had much smaller bridges over mountain creeks) and there was a death toll of about ten in that incident. The entire winter season of 1981-82 had a lot of rain and it must have been pretty close to doing what this event did, but apparently the dikes held. A lot of the massive flooding you see on TV was caused by a breached dike, if that had held, there would have been all the other damage noted but not the inundation of the Sumas Prairie. Our native people have taken some delight in mentioning that they didn’t approve of the draining of Sumas Lake back around WW-II and apparently just about everything else we’ve done, except of course the _____ and the _____. (bet you said what I said) … I suppose we will be no better as a conquered people than they are.

    1. Come from the West Kootenays. There were dams on the Kootenay River long before the 1948 flood as they supplied electricity to the mines at Rossland and the smelter at Trail. Rossland was one of the first cities to get electricity; suspect the electric came in while residents still used wells and had outhouses. The dams on the Columbia were begun in 1967 (Mica) and 1968 (High Arrow) respectively. The High Arrow dam was for flood control, but also to ensure a steady supply of water to the various dams further downstream in Washington state.
      During the flood of 1948, my father was one of the many volunteers who helped out trying to save downtown Trail from the rising Columbia. It was hard, dirty work with shovels and wheelbarrows. They were all relieved when heavy equipment was finally brought in which could effectively construct a dyke along the riverbank.

  3. My parents went through this, put his 96 acre farm up against the dikes on the Fraser and Vedder Rivers under 4 feet of water. When the water finally drained, plowed his pastures with a team of Clydesdales…through relentless clouds of mosquitos.

    They can take their climate change garbage and jam it up their unowhats!

    1. In the book, “Edenbank”, a history of the early pioneers of Chilliwack, Oliver Wells tells of an event in 1875 when massive snowfalls hit the mountains. Then, overnight, a Chinook blew in and melted most of it in a matter of a couple days. The Chilliwack River turned into a raging torrent, wiping out bridges and homes.

      There’s a photo in the book of a ferry stranded in ice on the Fraser River between Agassiz – Rosedale. He notes that the Fraser regularly froze over in the 1800s.

      I’ve seen photos of a horrible ice storm that hit the valley circa 1936, and took down just about every power and phone line through much of the valley. My step-mother showed me a photo around that same year in Chilliwack of fellow standing on the roof of his house…the old two story, pointed roof version of back then…with only the top couple of feet of the peak sticking out of a snowdrift.

      In the winter of ’64 Chilliwack received 96″ of snow, at one point about 3.5 ft deep in our yard in town. It hit -17 F one night there.

    1. Yeah, imagine that: build on a floodplain, get floods. But no, it’s really because the serfs haven’t accepted their serfdom yet. Once they do, the planet will begin to “heal.“

      It’s war.

  5. Remember, Canada and Australia basically got rid of a lot of temperature stats because they said they were unreliable/inaccurate.
    We know the Nile has frozen and so has the Thames.
    People in Ottawa act like the Ottawa river never floods or the Rideau river for that matter.
    The hubris of humans – city dwellers and computer dweebs – who think they know what the weather is supposed to do, what the climate is going to be, shows how disrespectful Ecotards and the Sky Is Falling Industry are towards nature & natural phenomena.

  9. Where are the Speakers for the Natives in B.C ? How come they didn’t ‘speak from tradition’ and forecast these floods ?
    Has ‘Global Warming’ prevented Gaia from speaking ?

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