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Pacific NW/AK/BC BC Flooding

Posaune

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Weirdly, our US news barely has anything about it but we tend to live in a bubble. :rolleyes:
The U.S. national news barely knows we exist here in Washington (How come it's always "Washington State" and not "Washington City" instead? Another rant.) The Seattle news barely knows that B.C. exists. It was weird to see the Seattle outlets, both printed and broadcast, ignore B.C. while putting all their attention on little Whatcom County which shares a border with no geographic significance with British Columbia. It was an international regional event but was covered following political boundaries, which does not help with public understanding of the problems that people who live here were dealing with. The little town of Sumas in the U.S. was devastated by the flooding, and that was covered extensively, but Sumas is right on the border and the much larger area immediately adjacent to the north was completely ignored for quite awhile by the Seattle media.
 

dbostedo

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It doesn’t mean that this flood type would occur only that often.
Well it DOES mean that, on average, or on a long enough timeline. If you could take current conditions and measure over say, 500 years, you'd expect to see 5 "hundred year" floods. But they could occur at random times within that 500 years and are unlikely to be evenly spaced out (which is what I think you understand and we're getting at - just trying to clarify).
 

François Pugh

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They basically look at a record of over thirty years, and count the number of times that flood or greater event occurred. If it occurred 3 times in 30 years, they say the probability of it happening in any given year is 3 in 30, or 1 in 10 or 10%. They then translate, using (what used to be considered?) high school probability math, this into a recurrence interval of 10 years ( 1/ (10%) = 1/0.1 =10).

They plot the data various ways so that they can get a better fit to estimate extreeme values, but most still assume "stationarity", meaning there is no trend, justified by the long time span and the small changes expected.

I do recall back in '79 arguing with my hydrology professor that the results would be bogus because things are changing due to global warming. Looking back, I would have gotten a better mark in that class had I just kept my mouth shut and stopped interrupting his class.

More sophisticated models do take trends into account, as best they can. However, the rate of global warming is unprecedented, so it's diffuclt to be accurate. A few years back the Ontario Ministry of Transportation revamped, er..enlarged all their culverts, as it was too obvious that they had not been designed big enough.
 
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scott43

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The U.S. national news barely knows we exist here in Washington (How come it's always "Washington State" and not "Washington City" instead? Another rant.) The Seattle news barely knows that B.C. exists. It was weird to see the Seattle outlets, both printed and broadcast, ignore B.C. while putting all their attention on little Whatcom County which shares a border with no geographic significance with British Columbia. It was an international regional event but was covered following political boundaries, which does not help with public understanding of the problems that people who live here were dealing with. The little town of Sumas in the U.S. was devastated by the flooding, and that was covered extensively, but Sumas is right on the border and the much larger area immediately adjacent to the north was completely ignored for quite awhile by the Seattle media.
I mean..we can speculate why...
 
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scott43

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More sophisticated models do take trends into account, as best they can. However, the rate of global warming is unprecedented, so it's diffuclt to be accurate. A few years back the Ontario Ministry of Transportation revamped, er..enlarged all their culverts, as it was too obvious that they had not been designed big enough.
Every gov't agency is looking at this. Stormwater infrastructure upgrades are being done on a replacement basis and in a targeted fashion. It bugs me when the media report that infrastructure is failing. It's actually working exactly as designed but the water volume is exceeding the design parameters. Hurricane Hazel has been the 100 year storm for us for some time. Unfortunately this was a system event, as significant as it was. We're now dealing with very localized high-volume downpours due to atmospheric moisture content and convective heating. For instance, in 2013, NW Toronto had 130mm of rain in 2 hours. This exceeds the 100 year storm event which is 125mm over 24 hours. However, if you moved 20km in any direction, no rain was recorded that day. So there is a big challenge as these warm weather events become more obvious in developed areas.

For most people, I would say, buy on higher ground... No joke.
 

Wendy

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Well it DOES mean that, on average, or on a long enough timeline. If you could take current conditions and measure over say, 500 years, you'd expect to see 5 "hundred year" floods. But they could occur at random times within that 500 years and are unlikely to be evenly spaced out (which is what I think you understand and we're getting at - just trying to clarify).
Yes. Much better explained than I would’ve done. Thanks. ogsmile
 

tomahawkins

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I spent the morning helping with the clean up in Sumas. Lots of debris scattered around, everything was wet and muddy, but much of the standing water has drained out. Almost everyone had their first floor flooded so lots of property damage and loss of personal items. Aside from pushed down fences, I didn't see much structural damage to houses. Talking with a local teacher, she said out of 1700 local students, 1200 had to find temporary places to live.
 
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scott43

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I spent the morning helping with the clean up in Sumas. Lots of debris scattered around, everything was wet and muddy, but much of the standing water has drained out. Almost everyone had their first floor flooded so lots of property damage and loss of personal items. Aside from pushed down fences, I didn't see much structural damage to houses. Talking with a local teacher, she said out of 1700 local students, 1200 had to find temporary places to live.
You're a good man Charlie Brown.. :thumb:
 

noncrazycanuck

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another evacuation order today.
lets all hope the Nootsack remains in it's bed.

on ski travel .
At best will be difficult to travel east from Vancouver to the interior via BC highways. Traffic is currently restricted to essential services only until more of the roads are fully operational.
The Coquihalla lost 5 bridges so even temporary spans are going to take a while. Tough work with winter conditions.
Route to central BC is now fly to Calgary or from US via Hwy 97 to Okanogan or north from Spokane
Whistler is still accessible from Vancouver, Hwy 99 north of Whistler is under repair.
 

SkiBam

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Last night we watched The Fifth Estate, a CBC news investigation program. They describe this episode as: "An investigation of B.C.'s catastrophic flooding and how the province could have been better prepared." Extremely interesting (and fun for me to see my daughter's friend interviewed).

Someone said to live on a hill! (I do, and I'm glad)

Don't know if the link works outside Canada.
 
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scott43

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I don't think we should be pointing too many fingers at the province. There's a lot of blame to go around.
 

DanoT

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noncrazycanuck

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latest round of rain has passed thankfully the Nooksack river remained below flood stage, so hopefully the clean up north of the border can pick up a bit of steam.
Currently our main east west highway is still either underwater or lacking bridges, the other highways are reduced to essential traffic only and frequently closed with more flooding and slides
So if you had any ski trips planned going from Vancouver to BC's interior your probably out of luck until at least January

on the positive side Sea to Sky -Vancouver to Whistler is open.
whistler Blackcomb has a lot of snow above mid station to dirt in the valley but still the most skiable terrain west of the Rockies. They are running early season ops until mid December

bonus after all this rain mid hill down the temps are now dropping -10c over the next couple of days so you can make use of your skates.
 
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scott43

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My MEC package hasn't left Vancouver in 2 weeks...way bigger fish to fry. Best wishes to all those struggling out there.
 

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