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Young mom grateful after being plucked from river Jennifer Feinberg The Progress
Continued: VEDDER/ p6
A rising Fraser River bursts its banks outside Chilliwack in 2007. The planned Lower Mainland Flood Management Strategy hopes to avoid the patchwork response to a flood threat, like what the Fraser Basin Council said occurred in 2007. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS FILE
Regional push forms on Fraser flood control Jeff Nagel Black Press A broad coalition of local and senior governments and other interests have joined forces to craft a coordinated strategy to safeguard the Lower Mainland from a catastrophic flood. The Lower Mainland Flood Management Strategy aims to pull together an action plan with costs within two years to begin the process of raising dikes and improving other flood defences in the years ahead. It’s unclear how the billions of dollars in needed work will be raised but advocates hope a regional approach will prove more logical than leaving individual municipalities to work in isolation
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on flood planning and lobbying for grants. The initiative led by the Fraser Basin Council was announced Tuesday and will focus on the risk of Fraser River flooding and coastal flooding from winter storm surges, which are expected to be amplified by a rising sea level. “We recognized early on the potential to collaborate around issues of flood and river management,” said Chilliwack councillor Jason Lum, who chairs of the Flood Control and River Management Committee of the Lower Mainland Local Government Association. “A major flood event in any of our member communities would have serious impacts on a provincial, even national scale.” Technical work is to begin later
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this year to better identify areas of the region that are most vulnerable to flooding. Fraser Basin Council chair Colin Hansen said a priorized strategy of what flood defence works are needed most urgently would guide spending. A blueprint for deliberate, planned upgrades would aim to avoid a repeat of 2007, when the Fraser threatened to flood and politicians frantically dispatched hundreds of dump trucks to raise dikes as an emergency action. “We did not know whether we were putting those dump truck loads in the most important places or not,” Hansen said. “We threw money at the problem on an urgent basis. We need to make sure taxpayers’ dollars
are spent effectively, targeting the highest risk areas first and dealing with the secondary concerns as we go forward.” Part of the case for a regionally agreed strategy is because flood water pushed back in one area will flow to another. Just building higher dikes in the Fraser Valley could simply direct more water at Richmond, Hansen said. Dikes are sometimes maintained by different municipalities on either side of a river – such as the Pitt River between Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam. If just one side is built higher to new standards, the other side would flood first in high water. Continued: FLOOD/ p4
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Tubing down the ChilliwackVedder river may seem like a good idea on a blazing hot day. But many are unaware of the dangers. The riverbanks are littered with flimsy floatation devices and destroyed dinghies, left behind by those who took the power of the river for granted. Natisha Dunn, 23, of Surrey is so thankful just to be alive. She owes it all to her brave Chilliwack rescuers. “One more minute and I would have let go,” she said. “My arms were shaking so bad.” She’d started saying her prayers while clinging to a log. Then she looked up and saw her two rescuers scrambling toward her. Two Chilliwack men jumped off their tubes and over to the logjam to reach her. “There really are good people out there,” Dunn said. “My dad died when I was four, and my son, Dante, is four now. I’m just so glad my son doesn’t have to live without me, and I’m here because of them.” Dunn said she had never tubed down the Vedder River before last Sunday. She and her boyfriend, Carlos, had been floating downriver, trying to stay connected with a rope between the two dinghies. When they saw the log pile, they tried to paddle away from the branches protruding out of the water. But the raging current was too strong and it dragged them right into the middle of a large logjam. “There was nothing we could do,” she recounted. Now Dunn says she’s so glad to be alive after her inflatable dinghy was punctured from the pressure of the rope, which left her clinging for dear life.