Thread by @invigilator4

This was very hard for me to watch.
I grew up in Chilliwack and in 30 years saw many floods, and even when I left BC in 1998, the calls to do something about the aging and inadequate dikes were loud and clear
You hear about 1894, 1948 etc but
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#BCFlood
gem.cbc.ca/media/the-fift…

what you don't hear about is what happens every year. Flooding is a part of life in the FV. Obviously not to this scale, but to hear the Abbotsford Mayor say he opted not to send out an emergency alert because "people could just look out their window" absolutely infuriates me
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To know that these people, who are accustomed to annual flooding, where not alerted to the severity of this flood just because the 160K people not impacted might "get upset" is a line of thinking I can't even comprehend.
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But why it was really hard to watch is because I have been in their shoes. So much of it brought back horrible memories
I lived in a small village in southern MB, in the RM of La Broquerie, one of 4 RM's that were impacted by the overland flooding of 2002.

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There are more similarities than differences between our flood 20 years ago and theirs.
Ours was not a result of rivers breaking through dikes, but of an overwhelmed ditch system that drained thousands of acres of wetlands for farming.
The system stalled out over us.

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This is why "they can look out their window" really turned a knife in my gut
We had no warning
Even as the waters were rising, we had no idea how severe it was about to get.
I can still see that day in my head 20 yrs later. I will probably see it just as clear 20 yrs from now
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I was in the kitchen, making supper. I had just sent my husband to the store for sour cream. He came back and said "take a look at the ditch, it's right to the top"
When I looked at that ditch, almost overflowing I had no idea what was about to come next
Nervous, but oblivious
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I continued cooking supper
I was completely unaware that, just a few blocks down the road, the two small culverts under the railway tracks where plugging with debris. Looking at the seemingly calm surface of the ditch, I had no idea how fast the runoff was flowing

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5 minutes later, the ditch overflowed into our yard. Even at that point we could not anticipate what was to come next
Minutes later it was building up around the outside of our home, a couple of inches deep. We had a false sense of security in that it wasn't coming in, yet
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15 minutes
That is how long it was between when we first saw the full ditch to when all hell broke loose.
I was standing in the kitchen when the crawl space cover blew off like a bomb had exploded under it and a geyser of water blasted out high enough to reach the ceiling.

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As we were watching the water slowly build up around the house, it was filling the crawl space to the point the entire basement was under pressure
Within minutes, the water was 2 ft high in the house, all of it coming from the hatch to the crawl space.

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We scrambled to get as many valuables as we could into the upstairs loft but when a neighbour came over to warn us we needed to get our vehicle out before our driveway culvert collapses, we focused on getting out.
Our Jeep Cherokee floor boards were already underwater.

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It was too late to cross the ditch on our driveway but the neighbours lot was slightly higher & we were able to drive through our back yards and get out by his

We had left our dog and cat in the upstairs room, just as the man in BC had to.

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Then MEMO moved in to the area and took over. At first they told us we could not go back in to get our pets. It was too dangerous they claimed.
We waited until they were preoccupied and, with the help of neighbours, we went in and got them. It was no easy task.

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Our giant mastiff balked as she came down the stairs. I can still picture as we convinced her to leap from the stairs to a chair, then to the couch, then jump from the couch out through the doorway.

It would be two weeks before EMO would let us back in our house

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By then, everything in the house was destroyed. All of our valuables we had moved upstairs were untouched by flood waters but had layers of mold & mildew

Even what might have been dried out was unsalvageable because the pig barn lagoons had contaminated the water

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Enter the birth of my hatred for CBC
My neighbours sent all the reporters wanting an interview to me
The journalists were respectful and caring, until the reporter for The National came to interview me
For 15 minutes she grilled me.
She was obsessed with bashing my employer

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At the time both my husband and I worked for a local Maple Leaf Foods contracted pig barn. She wanted dirt. She wanted to hear they ditched us in our hour of need. She wasn't getting it.
They bent over backwards for all of us.

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They gave every employee impacted by the flood 2 weeks of paid leave
They constantly came and check on us at the evacuation center, asking if we needed anything
For those who could work, they arranged transportation with tractors & trailers to get through the flooded areas
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Needless to say, the clip that made the National shared none of that, nor even the stories I told her of neighbours working together.
All that was shown was negative, 60 seconds of the lowest out of 15 minutes of praise for others

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We lost nearly everything. The MEMO aid we got was not only insufficient, it was conditional.
We got $15K to replace the contents of our home but the catch was we had to cough up 10% & everything must be purchased brand new.

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We got another $15K to "fix" our home that sat under 2 ft of water for over a week

Remember this when you hear of "emergency funds" going to those BC victims of flooding

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I see a parallel to 20 yrs ago.
Local municipalities sprung to action, doing the very best they could.
Neighbours helped neighbours.
And provincial bodies were just busy playing the blame game, pretending to be heros but just making things worse

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