As more information pours out over the recent flooding in British Columbia, it is becoming evident that government incompetence played a major role in the ensuing destruction.
A new report by the Vancouver Sun has shut down the BC NDP government’s attempts to hide behind the climate change narrative to avoid the responsibility of dealing with a natural disaster.
For years, the BC NDP government has known that a dike in Abbotsford meant to prevent these exact circumstances was doomed to fail.
They were even consulted in a report from 2015 after the BC government hired consultants to assess the 75 dikes in the Lower Mainland.
The report revealed that 71 per cent of the dikes were vulnerable to failure due to overtopping by floods. Consultants claimed that the condition of the Sumas Lake dike in Abbotsford was in an “unacceptable” condition.
“Overtopping is expected during Nooksack River overflow,” the authors wrote.
For years, the BC NDP sat on this information and did nothing about it until the worst-case scenario came to pass. As a result, some of the major dikes identified by the report collapsed as was predicted.
The provincial government has tried to paint the flooding as unprecedented, but in reality, flooding in the Sumas Prairie and elsewhere has occurred recently. Sumas Prairie, which was formerly Sumas Lake until it was drained in the 1920s, flooded as recently as 1990.
Back then, the flood caused the government to launch a task force to see what could be done. In 2003, a task force reported that a major flood could put Highway 1 underwater for days and cause millions of dollars in property and farm damage.
Then in 2020, another report also considered options to prevent flooding in the Sumas Prairie.
What is the point of expensive government consultations over the years if the government can’t follow through on the advice of its own experts?
Instead, the BC government has chosen the easy way out: to blame everything on climate change.
