Scenes from the Bella Coola valley

The house is gone. Not demolished, not covered in muck, not under a log jam. Gone. Nowhere to be seen. All that is left is a rectangular pool slowly draining back into the river.

Another house, more fortunate. 2 inches of slippery mud on the living room floor. Along with everything 4 feet of racing water could toss onto it.

A mobile home tilted crazily. A solid house on a rise holding a basement full of river.

A clear road rounds a corner and ends abruptly; there is a 4-foot drop, and then the river. The road picks up again at the next bend.

A highway hidden under a spill of big rocks. Farther along, logs. Better than no road.

A canoe tied up at the gap where a bridge used to be, with a rope across the stream to make it accessible from either side.

A half-dozen white chickens stepping warily out of their coop onto a plank over a new stream.

Just a few impressions of the "morning after" photos from the Bella Coola flood, here, and here.

But the news is good; there were no fatalities, no injuries. Everyone who needed to got out safely. Everyone is accounted for. The horses are back in the pastures (along with a flock of seagulls and the odd duck). The airport is open again, and a detour has been found around the washout on the highway across the Chilcotin. The hill is still closed, and will be for months, but there are flights down from the other side of Tweedsmuir Park; the valley is no longer isolated. There is a ferry on the way, bringing food and other necessities, as well as Bella Coola residents stranded away from home. A barge is bringing fuel and equipment; the bridges will be repaired.

But the locals aren't waiting for help to arrive. They're on the road already with graders, backhoes, trucks and wheelbarrows, cleaning up, repairing, filling in gaps. They're joining their neighbours to clean up the mess inside, with shovels and dustpans and buckets; one resident says, "We had many helpers doing all the dirty work alongside us, so it was almost a party. Not really!"

Not really. The work of a lifetime, for many, has gone in a day. Out here, away from "civilization", many people build their own homes, from scratch, out of local lumber and materials, adding to and modifying them as the family grows and changes. Memories run long in these homes; the kids grew up and went away to the cities to school, to work, to a life elsewhere; they bring their own kids back to spend the summer with Grandma and Grandpa, bedding down in the rooms they slept in as babies.

Yes, most of the damage will be repaired. Ruined homes will be rebuilt, as needed. Some things will never be the same. The valley people will cope.

Years from now people will look back and wonder why that road is the way it is or why some farmer has a nice field while the neighbor's isn't so good. Bella Coola will become relatively normal soon enough, but it will be a slightly new normal. Not everything will get rebuilt and not everything will get rebuilt the way we are used to. I guess that is how the way things have to go. (From Grizzly's blog.)

I zero in on the Bella Coola valley, because my heart is there. Friends, family, the mountains, the green fields and Nusatsum sleeping on his peak; they're in my blood. But the same scenes have been playing all over BC these last few days; floods in the Chilcotin, the road from Tahsis to Gold River washed out, flooding in Kingcome Inlet, Port Hardy, Port Alice, and more. On the other end of Canada, Hurricane Igor hit Newfoundland, causing one fatality, and destroying hundreds of homes. And I'm sure the same courage and resourcefulness is apparent in these places.

One thing I've noticed during the crisis; however far apart we have wandered, when disaster strikes, we come together again. One of the "kids" who live away from the valley started the Bella Coola Flood, 2010 Facebook group. At present, it has 1196 members, about half ex-residents, all sharing news, photos, offers of help. I've been talking with neighbours I haven't seen for 30 years, as if all that time was nothing; we are all Bella Coola valley-ites, and that's what counts.

My family has been talking about arranging a work party to go up and help the family there clean house and collect their belongings, now scattered far downstream. Other young people are doing the same; going up to help mothers and grandparents. A time to cement old friendships; good even comes out of tragedy.

No photos here, again. There are new photos in the flood album, in the Highways' album, and in Michael Wigle's album, more to the point.

Too much of a good thing. Far too much.

So what happened? Bella Coola residents know about the river and build for the periodic floods. Houses are built above the water level. Dikes and rip-rap reinforce unstable banks along the rivers and creeks. Bridges, even on the smaller creeks, are made to withstand the occasional flood-driven log jam. Road maintenance is conscientious.

And now ... the entire village of Hagensborg sits with its knees in the water. All the bridges from one end of the valley to the other, are damaged, some entirely gone. A sandbank up-valley caved in, taking a long section of highway with it. The "hill" on the road out to the rest of the world is impassible. Salmon, up the river for the annual spawn, lie dead in driveways. A shop ended up in a stand of trees downstream. The winter's supply of firewood, so neatly stacked for air drying, floats here and there.

And it's not flood season yet! That's still a month or so away.

The fall high water comes about the same time as the first hard frosts in the valley. "Up top", on the mountain peaks (5000 to 8000 feet), the winter snow cover is building up. When it rains on top of this new snow, there is a quick melt, and a rush of water streaming down the river. Noisy and violent it may be, but it usually stays between the river banks.

This flood is different. "Grizzly", at Bella Coola Blog, explains;

Piecing together comments on the extent of the rainfall it appears that what made this flood so big, is that the entire watershed of the Bella Coola - all the big tributaries, Salloomt, Nusastsum, Talchako, Atnarko all received a massive amount of rain.  Often these storms are most intensive in the lower valley or one of the tributaries, or sometimes the upper valley and not the lower valley, but this one was widespread.  You have a situation with a watershed of several 1000* sq km covered in 9 inches of water.

*He later checks this, and adjusts the total to 5149 sq. km.

In 36 hours, he reports, the rainfall in the valley measured 9.6 inches (245 mm.) I checked the normal averages: taking an average from 1971 to 2000, the rainfall for the entire month of September was 3.3 inches (83.5 mm.). Even for the rainiest month, October, the total only went up to 7.7 inches (194 mm.). That's per month. The sum for those two months is only a smidgen more that what fell in one and a half days this weekend.

9.6 inches doesn't really sound that much. But concentrate all that at the bottom of a deep, narrow valley, and it adds up to a torrent in a hurry to reach the sea. People report up to 8 feet of water over the highway, 4 feet in some houses.

And it's still raining. The water level dropped during the day today, but it is rising again. The forecast is for another 2 to 4 inches of rain by Tuesday night.

If you're reading Grizzly's blog, or news reports, or following the Facebook photo page, the map above might be helpful. Bella Coola townsite is at the bottom of the valley, where the inlet meets the river. The airplane icon is at the airport. The first yellow house icon is where I stayed this summer, in the heart of Hagensborg.  The second is the Saloompt bridge, (one that will be very difficult to replace, crossing an extremely fast section of river. For now, residents have been rigging up a pulley system to haul food and other supplies across the river.) And the third, on the right, is Firvale, and the site of my old home.

Here's the meadow I wrote about yesterday:

My neighbours' house is the one among the trees at the right. Last I heard, the water was to the top of the fence posts around the barn.

Pre-flood photo. One of the many creeks pouring down the mountainside into Hagensborg. The schoolhouse roof in the foreground.

For the record: the Saloompt bridge, in happier days. The normally greenish water (glacier runoff) today is a murky brown. And the river comes right up to the road.

There's an old native legend, about how there once was a very big flood in the Bella Coola valley, and a chief made a raft and saved his people. When the flood abated, he draped a rope around the tip of Saloompt mountain and tied the raft there. You can still see the mark of the rope, they say.

These days, the rafts are blue, inflatable, and made of plastic.

First fire, then flood.

I stood at my living room windows and watched the river rise. It had already flooded the meadow across the road and hidden the barbed-wire fence that surrounded it; now it lapped at the far shoulder of the road itself.

It was 1980; I had just bought my house in the Bella Coola valley, a log cabin nestled snugly at the bottom of a rocky mountain half-way up the valley. The property had garden plots on three levels, a good barn, roses, lilacs, and other flowering shrubs, an apple tree (transparents), and below us, below the level of the road even, a lawn with a row of purple plum trees.

I was watching to see if the flood waters would top the road and pour over into my plum "orchard". Otherwise, we were safe, on the first rise of our side hill.

While I stood staring out into the rain and mists, a pickup drove slowly around the bend of the road, and stopped by my corral. A couple of people, unidentifiable in yellow raingear, went to the back and unloaded a skiff, which they manhandled across the flooded fence. They climbed aboard and rowed off in the direction of the river, about a kilometre distant at that point.

Not a good day for a paddle on the river.

They cast about for a bit, then aimed for a spot towards the trees on the down-valley side. Squinting, I could see a shadow on the water there. They pulled up and got out of the skiff. Then nothing.

Later, when the water seemed to have slackened some (maybe it wouldn't flood my plums, after all!), I saw the explorers rowing back. They loaded the skiff into the pickup, turned around and headed down valley.

When the valley had finally dried, the machines came, and built a road to that hummock, the one with the flag at its highest point. There, my new neighbours built their house, high and dry in the middle of a flood plain. Bella Coola old-timers know their river.

That was 1980. The "big" flood that old-timers still talked about happened in 1968; then every single bridge in the long valley was knocked out. The Bella Coola River had carved new channels, undercut the road, and eaten away the land under a fool-hardy newcomer's house, too close to the bank.

Google terrain map of the Bella Coola Valley. About a mile wide at the widest point, 50 or so miles long.

This year, the river has broken all the rules. And suddenly, too; three days ago, residents were remarking at how low the river was for this time of year. And now, it has flooded beyond its 1968 record, beyond the memories of living men. (There was a flood that left the townsite dry in 1936; the previous major flood was in 1896.)

The valley is in the news; here's a report from CBC News. Look at the accompanying photo; the house I stayed in when I visited last month is just on the left of the open area, nearest the river. Fortunately, my hosts hooked up the trailer and moved it up valley when the rains started. My son-in-law says his Dad "doesn't like wet socks." A typical Bella Coola-ite downplaying of difficulties; all his electronic equipment is in his drowned basement, and his wife's prize garden is a rueful memory.

But they're lucky. As before, the bridges have gone. And the water, from 3 rivers and many good creeks pouring down from those tall mountains, has flooded almost the entire valley floor, from the extreme right of my map to the tide flats at the left. Above the valley, the road has been washed out, and will probably not be opened again for several months. The dike separating the airport from the river breached, and the river tore up the runway.

The valley is isolated, as it was for so many years before the road was built. And more; each segment of the valley, split as it is by tumultous rivers, is isolated from the others. Many people got out on time; many did not.   It was all too sudden. A couple of my friends woke up in the morning, dry on the second floor of their house, to find, below, their couch floating around the living room. They got out, in a boat; their horses, as far as I know, are still stranded in the field.

But the valley people are strong and resourceful; they'll survive, though life is going to be difficult this winter. They are working hard, already. Volunteers are out marking damaged spots on the road, shoring up shaky foundations, picking up stranded residents and ferrying them to safety before the next rise in the water.

Because more rain is on its way. It's expected to continue through Monday, and on into Tuesday.

I have no photos, this time. I'm too far away, here in the Fraser Valley. But there is a Facebook group, "Bella Coola Flood, Sept. 2010, with 193 photos. An ex-valleyite started it, others have added more, and those of us who can are labelling the photos for people wanting to know about their families' situations. This photo is of a bridge that went out in 1968; the "temporary" bridge held out this time, but the road access is gone. A hundred people or so are stranded on the far side.

Why was the flood so unexpected, and so extreme this year? I'll explain, next post.