A tour of the flood-ravaged parts of the province finds communities supporting each other following disaster.
For much of this week, I’ve been traveling through some of the flood-ravaged areas of British Columbia and speaking with people whose lives have been upturned by the province’s second natural disaster in six months. My report from the trip will be published after this newsletter goes out. But before I headed to British Columbia I wrote about the connections between climate change, the deadly heat wave that led to drought and wildfires in the province and this month’s torrential rainfalls and flooding. [ Read: Vancouver is Marooned by Flooding and Besieged Again by Climate Change] My work has taken me to many disaster scenes over many years. But the extent of the devastation on people’s lives and the landscape and public infrastructure from the rain that came down on parts of British Columbia nearly two weeks ago is exceptional. The deaths of five people have now been attributed to it as well. As Ian Willms, a photographer, and I visited various communities caught up in the disaster this week, some other extraordinary patterns emerged. The flood victims we approached were, without fail, gracious about sharing their stories of harrowing escapes and, in many cases, having lost everything they owned.
