Nearly every year around this time, everyone – officials and ordinary folk alike – cast a wary eye at the Fraser River.
Thoughts rise to the Interior mountains and the snow pack of the previous winter. Current thermometer readings are added to anticipated rainfall, and the odds of another 1948 are calculated: things will be okay if they don’t all add up to 25 feet of floodwater – 7.6 metres at the Mission gauge in today’s numbers.
Actually, 6.1 metres – nearly five feet short of the 1948 benchmark – is designated as dangerous, and sighs of relief are heaved when the numbers breach that limit, but not the dikes that protect floodplains along the river – dikes that narrow the river’s flow and actually increase the chances of disastrous flooding during the spring freshet.
Floodplains are natural basins to catch the extra run-off when the snow has been deep and the rains are warm. Every floodplain removed from the river’s natural system by diking and construction creates another bottleneck to back up the flow of water.
Considering how readily floodplains are preempted by human activity, it’s a bit surprising, looking back through the records, to see how often those sighs of relief have been heaved. Flooding isn’t an occasional problem in the Fraser Valley.
In 1950, water rose to within inches of the 1948 disaster level. In 1954, the Langley Advance reported predictions of heavy flooding “and the Boundary Health Unit offered typhoid inoculations to Langley residents.”
Similar stories appear every few years.
While the flood watches capture our attention several times every decade, it’s 1941, rather than 1948, that is the real exception to the Fraser flood rule. It was the first floodless spring recorded in the history of Fort Langley.
Even as a disastrous flood, 1948 was a mere baby spitting up, compared to 1894.
Old-timers from the area noted that, prior to May of 1894, Brae Island and McMillan Island were clearly separated – not just by a road and a ditch. Flood waters that dwarfed the 1948 levels swept about half of McMillan Island downriver. The island folded in on itself, reducing Bedford Channel from the main Fraser waterway between Maple Ridge and Fort Langley into the quaint little jet-ski play area that it is today.
It’s something to think about when the next riverside community development is proposed.
