Abbotsford residents told to evacuate “catastrophic” flood conditions in Sumas Prairie

Residents of Sumas Prairie in Abbotsford were faced with a late-night evacuation order last night, as the Barrowtown Pump Station threatened to fail within hours.

Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun held an emergency press conference 9pm Tuesday warning that if the station were to fail, the repercussions would be “catastrophic” with a significant risk to life.

The station pumps water out of the basin that used to be Sumas Lake. Its failure would start to push water from the Fraser River at an extremely dangerous rate into the basin.

There were two to three hundred residents who hadn’t evacuated at that point, Braun said, as he pleaded with them to abandon their cattle and other animals and leave the area immediately. The area is home to farms that produce a large portion of BC’s dairy and poultry products.

“Nothing is worth your life,” he said.

“I implore anyone who is listening to this to please heed the evacuation order and leave. Tomorrow morning may be too late.”

Read detailed coverage on the situation in Abbotsford from the Fraser Valley Current.

Meanwhile, at least one person is dead and two more missing in a mudslide near Lillooet, as much of the province looks towards the aftermath of the devastating flood earlier this week.

RCMP confirmed yesterday that they had extricated the body of a Lower Mainland woman from the scene of a Monday morning slide on Highway 99.

They also believe there may be more people missing in the slide, and are asking anyone concerned about loved ones to contact Pemberton or Lillooet RCMP.

While the worst of the weather might be over for many parts of BC, including Burnaby, parts of the province have a long recovery ahead.

Evacuation orders are still in effect for many parts of the Fraser Valley, and Highway 1 likely will not be open for days to come as crews work to clean up debris and flooded roadways.

Meanwhile, it could be “weeks or months” before the Coquihalla Highway—parts of which have completely broken away from the road—could be ready for use again.

Crews managed to open up an emergency vehicle lane on Highway 7 west of Aggasiz late Tuesday, the government said.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth defended his government’s response to the “extreme weather event” at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, saying that while agencies issued travel and river flow advisories over the weekend, the weather ended up being far worse than expected.

Farnworth said that the hundreds of people who had been stranded Monday night on BC’s highways after three separate mudslides had been successfully rescued.

He said more than a thousand people were sheltering in Hope and that the province was working on creating an access road linking Hope back to the Lower Mainland.

“One of our key priorities is making sure there’s a flow of supplies so that people can buy food and essential goods in areas with flooding and damaged roads,” he told reporters.

Transport Canada is working to re-establish supply chains for communities that have been completely isolated from others. In the meantime, Farnworth told British Columbians, “patience is the name of the game”.

The province will decide Wednesday whether to declare a state of emergency—BC’s third in the past year after the COVID pandemic and this summer’s devastating wildfire season.

When asked why the province’s emergency alert system, which would send text messages to residents warning them of the dangerous conditions, wasn’t activated, Farnworth said numerous alerts had already gone out and the text system isn’t a “silver bullet.”

The emergency alert system was also not immediately activated in the face of the City of Abbotsford’s warning of “catastrophic” conditions.

Farnworth put out a statement on the situation just before 11:30pm Tuesday.

“This evening, I have been in continual contact with Henry Braun, mayor of Abbotsford. Emergency Management BC has been working with Abbotsford Emergency Management staff and the Abbotsford Police Department,” he said.

“Emergency Management BC has been ready and available to issue a broadcast intrusive alert through the Alert Ready system. The City of Abbotsford has indicated that it does not want to issue an alert at this time. Abbotsford officials are in the process of directly contacting all those affected by this notice.”

The minister said he’s been in contact with federal public safety minister Bill Blair as well to request federal assistance on the situation in Abbotsford and the flooding in BC in general, including support from the the Canadian Armed Forces.

The deadly flood comes just months after the heat dome that brought unprecedented temperatures to the Lower Mainland and killed nearly 600 British Columbians—an incident that also brought blistering criticism to BC’s emergency preparedness protocols.

And while Farnworth said the flood was an unprecedented natural disaster in this region of the world, he also acknowledged that climate change means these types of incidents will become more and more common.