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Collapsed bridges, crumbling highways: Canada's extreme flooding in pictures

Anthony Sharwood

In weather terms, the Canadian province of British Columbia has done a decent job on two occasions this year of imitating the classic old Crocodile Dundee line, "That's not a knife, THIS is a knife!"

In late June and early July, it was, "That's not a heatwave, THIS is a heatwave!" as temperatures reached an almost unbelievable 49.5 °C, and now it's a case of, "That's not a flood, THIS is a flood!"

Which is not to downplay the serious flood situation on the Lachlan River in Forbes and nearby parts of the NSW Central West, but the flooding this week on British Columbia's Fraser River is on an almost unimaginable scale.

Abbotsford before n after

Image: Source: @delightfilledart via Instagram.

The image above says it all. It was taken at McKee Peak, a hill in Abbotsford, a city of around 140,000 people just southeast of Vancouver, virtually right on the US border.

The British Columbia government has declared a state of emergency, and while the confirmed death toll sits at one person for now, several people are missing and the government has warned the toll will likely rise.

Meanwhile at least 18,000 people have been displaced – a tally also expected to soar.

Thousands of farm animals are also dead in what is being called an "agricultural disaster".

And dramatic pictures continue to emerge of collapsed highways and bridges.

How big is the Fraser River?

The Fraser is a huge, swift, snow-fed beast which rises in the Rocky Mountains near the Alberta border, flows northwest, then makes a long swing south, and finally a 90-degree turn west, ending up in Vancouver.

The Port of Vancouver and other major nearby docks and shipping facilities are currently completely cut off from the rest of Canada, by road and by rail.

At around 1300 km, The Fraser is similar in length to Australia’s Lachlan and Murrumbidgee Rivers, but its discharge (the amount of water it carries) is many, many times higher.

So what caused this disaster?

Canadian meteorological authorities have been calling it an "atmospheric river". Essentially, it was a weather system that flowed across the southwest corner of British Columbia and over a period of two days, bringing strong winds and extremely heavy rain with totals around 200 mm in two days in some areas.

The city of Vancouver itself registered 120.2 mm of rain over three days, but totals were higher inland in the Fraser catchment.

But it's not just the sheer volume of water that has done the damage. The catchment of the Fraser encompasses a vast area of mountainous, forested terrain where factors other than topography come into play in terms of dictating the volume of water that ends up in the river.

SNOW: This was a warmish weather system by local standards for mid November. That meant that rain fell on early season snow, melting it, and dramatically increasing the amount of runoff.

SOIL: British Columbia had its second-worst fire season on record after the midyear heat, and the soils in forested landscapes are currently in a state which scientists called "hydrophobic" – meaning they repel water. So in simple terms, the mountain slopes are ill-equipped at present to absorb such extreme amounts of rain.

All of this is adding up to a humanitarian and ecological disaster of an immense scale, and it's far from over as we write this story.

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