Stranded, they found Hope: Burnaby couple recounts harrowing story of finding shelter in floods

Enda Brophy and his wife thought they were in for a relaxing weekend getaway in Kelowna—their first vacation without the kids in two years.

But the Burnaby residents ended up being stranded in Hope for two days, hunkering down at a temporary shelter along with nearly 1,200 other British Columbians who were caught in the devastating floods this weekend.

The couple left Kelowna around 1pm Sunday to begin their drive back home, assuming it would roughly take the same four hours it had taken them to get there.

They received alerts from their weather app that there would be an atmospheric river coming through—but Brophy said they’d also received similar warnings in the past month, and while not easy to drive through, those had been passable.

They were wrong. They reached the Coquihalla Highway to find it was closed due to floods, before driving up the Nicola Highway to Highway 1—which by that point, had also been shut. So they drove down to Princeton.

“That drive was the most terrifying drive I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve never seen a storm like that. We’ve had some pretty severe storms, but clearly, this was out of a different order of magnitude,” Brophy told the Beacon.

“It was like white knuckle driving for over 100 kilometers. We saw cars pulled over on the side of the road. There were sections which were basically like rivers going across the highway. There was debris, there were moments where we were essentially at a standstill, moving very, very, very slowly. It was a profoundly scary drive.”

Close call near Princeton

When they finally reached Princeton, it turned out that their way home from there had been shut down 45 minutes earlier. Unbeknownst to them, it was because of a huge landslide caused by the floods that had trapped hundreds of people on the side of the highway.

“We’re just counting ourselves lucky that we were okay. If we were there 45 minutes or an hour earlier, we could have been among the people that were swept away or, or trapped or worse,” he said.

They spent the night and most of the next day in the car, watching the relentless rain outside their windows and hearing “worse and worse things” of the possibilities to come.

Finally, Brophy and his wife decided it was time to seek out shelter in Hope—they were two of hundreds of people in the same situation.

And the people of Hope have provided just that.

“The shelter has been our home base since then, for a couple of days now. And we have been just really, really impressed with their response effort and filled with gratitude. The people that have been taking time out of their lives to help us out,” he said.

“There’s a really impressive spirit of camaraderie there, and solidarity, which is quite moving and very powerful to be a part of. And that’s essentially where we are. We have zero sense of when the roads might be opening up again, but rumours are rife.”

Concerns with communications infrastructure

The province has come under fire for not activating the Alert Ready system that would have sent emergency text alerts warning of the floods to all phones in BC. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth repeatedly said Wednesday that the system is “not a silver bullet”, and said he would defer to the advice of experts on the ground rather than “experts on Twitter”.

Brophy doesn’t so much have gripes with the level of warnings and advisories sent out by government agencies, he said, because he feels that if the government had any sort of inkling the weather would be as bad as it was, they would have been far more vocal about the level of danger.

But Brophy said while there has been an incredible display of goodwill and solidarity from the community, it’s clear the province needs to do more infrastructure planning for the next disaster.

“Along a lot of the highways that we drove, we weren’t able to access mobile network, which was utterly terrifying. If something had happened, we would not have been able to call for help,” he said.

“It’s kind of a shocking situation when you have a bunch of oligopoly telecommunications carriers building out 5G networks, but they can’t get it together to have network access along our highways. I think that’s completely shocking.”

Brophy was also disappointed to find that local radio news stations—the only source of information available—were still switching over to national programming like they normally do, instead of ensuring that local coverage of the floods was reaching people stranded on the roads.

When Brophy spoke to the Beacon Wednesday morning, he had no idea how long it would be before he and his wife could head back home to their kids. Ultimately, the province announced just before 5pm that it would be temporarily reopening Highway 7 westbound to allow people stranded in Hope to head back to the Lower Mainland.

Panic buying beginning

The Ministry of Transportation said Wednesday that crews are actively working on opening up emergency access routes. Those will be for essential use only, such as to transport food, water, and other essential goods.

Meanwhile, grocery stores in Hope and surrounding areas of the Fraser Valley are already seeing a rash of panic buying, with shelves left empty. Gas stations in many parts of the province are also seeing long lines as people rush to fill up their vehicles.

Farnworth said the Emergency Act and assistance from the federal government will ensure BC’s gas supply.

Premier John Horgan, urging British Columbians to keep calm and not to hoard supplies, said the province is working hard to ensure that supply chains see as little disruption as possible.

“Do the right thing. Do what your mom told you to do when you were little. You don’t need 48 eggs, just get a dozen,” he said.

Brophy called the buying and hoarding “a kind of a counter-force to that solidarity the—return of a really individualistic, consumeristic, and really kind of panic-affected mentality, which is sad to see and to hear about.”

Despite the devastation, Brophy is trying to stay positive. “We’ve seen both sides of the coin here in Hope. And I really hope that the solidarity side wins out,” he said.