Mudslides and landslides are a major concern for both British Columbia and Washington. They also experienced wildfires that completely wiped the town of Lytton off the map.įresh burn scars from the wildfires are also making the flooding and mudslide potential worse, Zhong pointed out. They endured a relentless heatwave that gripped the entire region and killed nearly 600 people. The water and sewage system went down, and the entire town had to be evacuated.”īritish Columbia has suffered a great deal since the summer months. But with the combination of rain and snowmelt, the entire town flooded. “That town is in an area that doesn’t get a lot of rain. “Merritt is a town of 7,000 people and is totally flooded,” Zhong said. Merritt, British Columbia, is one of those towns. The unprecedented amount of rain has created major flooding, washing out bridges and roads, completely cutting off many other small Canadian towns to the rest of the world. He added more than half of the egg and dairy supply for Vancouver come from that farmland, which has hit the region exceptionally hard. It has been farmland for the last 100 years, and now it’s a lake again,” Zhong explained. Then they pumped the water out to make good farmland. “One hundred years ago there was a Sumas lake. One of the areas seeing the greatest amount of flooding was the Sumas area, about 50 miles east of Vancouver. “One of our atmospheric river events rained much higher than 2500 meters, so that rain melted the snow and helped create the flooding.”
There has also been rain on top of fresh snow, which has exacerbated flooding. “The first atmospheric river event hit us hard on November 13 to 16, and it dumped a lot, 150-300 mm (roughly 6 to 11 inches), of precipitation in less than 48 hours,” Johnson Zhong, a meteorologist for Environment Canada said.
The problem for both regions this year has been the consistency of the systems, with no breaks for drying in between.
Rivers in the sky have led to landslides blocking roads, rivers inundating towns, and in one case, returning an old lake bed back into a lake.īritish Columbia typically sees atmospheric river events in the month of November, just as the Pacific Northwest does.
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