Walking around Grand Forks, British Columbia you can still see and feel the impacts of the devastating floods. In North Ruckle, there is an eerie feeling that you have just stepped foot into a ghost town as windows and doors are boarded up, the grass is overgrown, and weeds are taller than fences. In the City of Grand Forks was devastated by record floods after two days of intense rainfall. Between May 8β11, around 50 mm of rain fell in just 24 hours.
In Grand Forks specifically, Boundary rivers surpassed the highest levels they had seen since and ripped through homes and downtown businesses. More than 2, residents in Grand Forks and Osoyoos were displaced and there were 23 states of local emergency.
I was waking up every morning with the feeling of hands around my neck. Four hundred homes and one hundred small businesses were destroyed. Aside from financial impacts, the flood also took a mental toll on residents. According to the Red Cross Emergency Management Program, about people reached out for mental health support. Many of the impacted homes were expropriated by the city to improve flood infrastructure, and many residents that had called this area home their entire lives were forced to pick up and leave.
On paper, what happened in Grand Forks seemed to be the perfect storm. By March 1 of that year, the Boundary region received per cent of normal snowfall. Then came the extreme heat that caused rapid snow melt, and that was followed by heavy rain events. Fast forward to , when another deadly storm devastated B.
An intense atmospheric river dumped record amounts of rain on the province, washing away stretches of highway, flooding towns like Merritt and Abbotsford, and cutting Vancouver off from the rest of the country.
