Abbotsford mayor says feds need to ‘be at the table’ for cross-border flood talks

Abbotsford Mayor Ross Siemens says the federal government “has to be at the table” when it comes to addressing cross-border flood issues.

Siemens, speaking Friday (Dec. 12) at a news briefing, said the city has done everything it can within its power to tackle the problem, but the feds in 2024 denied funding for flood mitigation work.

“The challenge that we’re facing right here on the west side of the (Sumas) prairie is primarily the Transboundary Flood Initiative issue. And unless they do something on the American side, there is not much we can do on our end unless it’s our flood mitigation plan, which we’ve been working on, and we were turned down for funding from the federal government,” Siemens said.

“So we had to regroup … However, that long-term Transboundary Flood Initiative, that’s where we need the federal government to elevate this.”

Both the major flood of 2021 and the one this week occurred when the Nooksack River in Washington State overflowed its banks.

Siemens and two other B.C. mayors – Micheal Goetz of Merritt and Spencer Coyne of Princeton – held a press conference in June 2024, saying they felt abandoned by the federal government after being turned down for millions of dollars in flood infrastructure funding.

Emergency Management Minister Kelly Greene said at Friday’s briefing that some infrastructure work has been completed and/or is underway in the region following the 2021 floods.

She said this includes $76 million in provincial funding approved for resiliency of the Barrowtown pump station in Abbotsford.

The city has said that most of its 300 recovery projects – including repairs to dikes, riverbanks, landslide sites and key pump-station infrastructure – have been completed since 2021, but the region is still not protected from another major flood.

The damage from this week’s flood has yet to be assessed, including the number of barns that have been impacted and the amount of livestock that has been lost.

Agriculture Minister Lana Popham on Friday said releasing those numbers now is “really stressful for the farmers to hear.”

“We will definitely have those numbers later, but during the emergency we like to keep that to a minimum,” she said.

David Campbell with the River Forecast Centre said more rainfall is expected in the next week, but it’s difficult to predict the outcome at this point.

“It’s really just event to event … We can see that it can shift north or south a little bit, and that makes a big difference in terms of hazards that are posed to British Columbia and specifically through the Fraser Valley,” he said.

“We’re going to continue to monitor that, but I think that vigilance around a stormy, wet period through the coming week is the best way that we can be prepared.”

There are currently 450 properties on evacuation orders in Abbotsford, with another 1,700 properties under evacuation alert.