The benefits, opportunities, costs, and challenges of restoring Sumas Lake (Part 2)

STOP! This is the second part of our story on the benefits, opportunities, costs and challenges of restoring Sumas Lake. You should start by reading the first part, which you can find here.

This is a long story. We get it. You can jump back into your place using these links.

Introduction: The costs of protection | The lay of the land

Benefits and opportunities: Flood protection | Environmental | People and reconciliation | Economic and financial | Tourism and recreation | Cultural and historical | Relationships

Costs and challenges: Flood protection | Buyouts | Infrastructure | Agricultural | Economic | Housing | Mosquitoes | Social | Coordination and politics

Conclusion: Final Questions | The Sumas Lake To-Do List

Costs

Restoring Sumas Lake could bring significant benefits. But it would come with real costs—and those expenses would go far beyond just the price to buy out owners on the Sumas lakebed.

Flood protection

The Sumas Lake bed occupies only about one-third of Sumas Prairie. And unless the entirety of the prairie was evacuated—something that would more than triple buyout costs while hugely increasing infrastructure and commercial costs—a restored lake would not eliminate the need to take costly steps to prepare the area for future floods. 

In fact, a restored lake would either increase the flood threat for surrounding areas, or require costly new flood-prevention infrastructure.

Sumas Prairie—including hundreds of properties, businesses, and homes beyond the typical extent of Sumas Lake and the area where the UBC researchers considered the costs of buyouts—is exposed to potential flooding from two different directions and rivers.

Most obviously, the Nooksack River poses a danger to Canadian properties that lie between the US/Canada border and the Fraser River. A reborn Sumas Lake would remove some of those properties from existence, but if people, businesses, and infrastructure remained on the western end of Sumas Prairie, they would remain at risk.

Sumas Lake might be expected to decrease the total area in western Sumas Prairie that is susceptible to flooding during a moderate Nooksack River flood. Instead of pooling on the prairie, water might flow downhill towards Sumas Lake and collect there. That could mitigate both the depth and spread of the water. But that assumes that Sumas Lake was not already full to capacity—hardly a guarantee when multiple storms can swell water tables and the Fraser River.

And unless it was confined by dikes, the path of the water from the Nooksack toward Sumas Lake would be unpredictable and subject to change from one flood to the next.

Just like today, there would be no cheap, easy way to deal with the problem. Authorities would have the same three options: buy out properties along the Nooksack’s flood path, build dikes and berms to funnel water away, or just let homeowners deal with the risk on their own. 

But crucially, the Nooksack isn’t the only danger. Unless, again, the entirety of Sumas Prairie was bought out, the flood threat Fraser River would remain, and could increase.

Because the lake’s size would be tied to the height of the Fraser River, high water events in the Fraser could push the lake well beyond the “boundary” sketched out by the researchers in the recent study. 

That study relied on surveyors’ notebooks for its analysis of the “historical lake boundary” of Sumas Lake. But while they may have accurately gauged the lake’s typical footprint, the boundary defined by early naturalists was just the spot at which they happened to witness the lake. Indeed, the nebulous boundary of the water was one thing that frustrated early settlers, who were vexed that they couldn’t count on the lake being one particular size from year to year.

This challenge would return. The flatness of Sumas Prairie, and the variability of the Fraser’s height, mean that left in a natural state, the lake’s size could expand significantly.

During the 1894 flood, the largest on record, the Fraser’s waters covered the entirety of the prairie, reaching all the way into Washington State. That territory at risk of flooding is more than triple the size of the buyout territory considered by the study. Most years would see less land inundated—but most is not all. Without the construction of a new dike, one area that would be at major risk would be the community of Yarrow, on the southeastern edge of the lake boundary. 

The Fraser’s threat would force difficult conversations about flood protection. They aren’t unresolvable, but they would require decisions and, probably, compromises and a lot of money.

Authorities would need to consider what should be done about the hundreds of additional properties in the western parts of the prairie, and they would need to discuss just how “managed” they want their managed retreat to be. New floodgates could be installed at the site of Barrowtown Pump Station to attempt to cap the size of Sumas Lake when the Fraser rises particularly high. But that would reduce the natural state of Sumas Lake, while not addressing the challenge posed by the Nooksack—the impetus of the entire discussion in the first place.

The future of the Sumas Dike would pose a particularly large dilemma. The dike sits in the middle of Sumas Prairie and plays two roles that, in some ways, run contrary to one another. Because it prevents water from draining into the Sumas lakebed, the dike aggravates flooding in the western Sumas Prairie area when the Nooksack breaches its banks. If the restoration of Sumas Lake is aimed at reducing damages from a Nooksack River flood, the dike would need to be significantly modified or removed. 

But the dike also has a function if flooding were to come from the opposite direction— the Fraser River. In that case, the dike protects those western Sumas Prairie properties. In the event of major Fraser flood, the dike would keep that river’s water in the Sumas Lake area (but also increase the height of the water in those areas). Were the dike to be removed, properties in the western Sumas Prairie area would be susceptible to floods caused by the Fraser River—especially if Sumas Lake’s level wasn’t restricted by new floodgates.

(You can read our story about how exactly that plays out on the prairie here.)

Because the flood threat comes from two different directions, there is no simple way to protect the entirety of Sumas Prairie. A floodgate at Barrowtown and smaller berms that could gently curb the lake’s expansion in high water years are probably the most pragmatic option. They would reduce some of the benefits of turning Sumas Lake loose to create new wetlands, and lie contrary to the concept of returning the prairie to its natural state. But if the berms were only rarely needed, most of the environmental benefits could still exist. 

But they would be costly and might also need to be accompanied by an even more expensive pump station. Without pumps, flood protections that currently protect the western Sumas Prairie from the Fraser would keep water stuck there in the event of a Nooksack flood.

It’s also not just Sumas Prairie infrastructure that would need to be rejigged. The draining of Sumas Lake coincided with a whole-scale redrawing of the Fraser Valley’s waterways, including the building of the Vedder Canal. Allowing the lake to re-form would require planning for, and potentially adjusting, the canal and its southwestern dike. 

Buyouts

The recent Sumas Lake study has pegged the cost of buying out properties on the Sumas Lake bottom at about $1 billion. The authors say those figures come directly from BC Assessment land and building values for all the properties within the defined Sumas Lake “boundary.”

But the actual figure needed to buy out property owners in such a way that they do not feel forced from their land—as Semá:th Chief Dalton Silver says is needed—could be much higher.

The Sumas lakebed area is around 9,000 acres (though the study itself acknowledges that the lake could expand to three times that footprint).

The going rate for good prairie farmland is around $120,000 per acre. That would put a general market cost of the value of the land alone at roughly $1.1 billion. That figure doesn’t include the value of structures and associated businesses. It also doesn’t cover any properties beyond the lake boundary used in the study. 

The specific rates and buyout amounts would be subject to both inflation, the housing market, and court challenges. For buyouts to meet any positive reception, they’d likely need to be at above-market rates. Property owners already have the option to sell their homes at a market rate. Economic laws and logic dictates that a premium must be paid to change the mind of an owner who is not already planning on selling their property.

Other market forces—specifically a lack of comparable land—would likely drive up the cost of Sumas Lake buyouts. Because of its history and location on an old lakebed, the area’s farmland is some of the most productive in all of British Columbia. Farmland like it is incredibly rare in the province.

Although most managed retreat scenarios are focused on the relocation of homeowners from one site to another—and assumes the plentiful supply of relocation choices—a Sumas lakebed farm operation will have few potential landing places and may require significant payout to relocate willingly. That’s not true for every business—poultry producers can operate on less-than-ideal plots of land elsewhere in the valley—but the lakebed itself is dominated by a high concentration of vegetable, berry, and forage crops because of the value of its land.

Buyouts would have the twin effect of both significantly reducing the supply of, and increasing the demand for, prime BC farmland. Sumas Lake farmers would be aware that they may find themselves in a bidding war against former neighbours who had also been bought out.

Infrastructure 

Sumas Prairie isn’t just home to farms and homes. It’s also one of Canada’s most important transportation and energy corridors. The resurrection of a lake could create huge costs in reconfiguring critical infrastructure.

Most obviously, Highway 1 crosses the former bed of Sumas Lake and its greater floodplain, carrying thousands of cars and much of the country’s Vancouver-bound commercial truck traffic. The highway travels for more than 16 kilometres across the Sumas Prairie floodplain. About half of that is over the northern part of the Sumas lakebed itself.

In light of the highway’s prolonged closure in 2021, the province is looking at raising the road as part of plans to widen the artery throughout the valley. Those costs to raise the road to withstand occasional floods are already baked in. But the restoration of a permanent Sumas Lake would require further reinforcements that would likely cost huge sums. 

Building eight kilometres of highway over a lake—even one that is very shallow—requires a much higher degree of resiliency than raising a highway so it can function during the Nooksack River’s occasional forays north. Highway 1 would need to be able to resist erosion from the lake’s fluctuating water levels and its occasional floods. Causeway-style options would be cheaper but entail significant environmental compromises; it would also still require bridges or extensive culverts to permit water to move from one part of the lake to another. A bridge-like structure that minimized impacts on fish would be hugely expensive, given the length of highway impacted.

The highway wouldn’t be the only road affected by the changes. A restored Sumas Lake would likely result in the elimination of secondary road connections between Abbotsford and Chilliwack. That would reduce back-up routes in the event that Highway 1 is closed. Chilliwack and Abbotsford’s city governments would need to consider whether a new route along Vedder Mountain would be necessary. Chilliwack would also likely need to bolster its north-south traffic routes to accommodate heavy seasonal traffic from Lower Mainland drivers headed to Cultus Lake and the Chilliwack River Valley. 

The prairie isn’t just a major thoroughfare for traffic; it is also a major energy transportation corridor. It’s home to two pipelines—Trans Mountain’s oil pipeline and Enbridge’s natural gas pipeline—along with a major BC Hydro transmission line. Both Trans Mountain and Westcoast Energy operate pump stations on Sumas Prairie, albeit not on the lakebed itself.

Both pipelines are underground. But the restoration of Sumas Lake could require rebuilding the pipelines to accommodate the new conditions. Similarly, BC Hydro’s existing high-voltage transmission lines would bisect a reformed Sumas Lake. The permanent arrival of a lake directly beneath the cable lines—particularly in an area prone to ice storms—seems likely to require a close examination and possible relocation of the transmission route. As a general rule, BC Hydro avoids putting transmission towers in the middle of permanent lakes. 

Agricultural

Sumas Prairie, as a whole, has some of the most expensive, productive, and coveted farmland in the province. And within the broader prairie, the lakebed stands out for the bounty it can produce. The Semá:th people harvested wapato from the lake’s edge, and its surrounding grasses were the reason farmers initially settled there. The desire for more fertile land was a significant factor in draining the lake.  

Across Abbotsford today, most farm properties are used for growing food for chickens and cows. Those crops have helped Abbotsford become the hub for BC’s poultry and dairy industries. Almost all of BC’s agricultural organizations have head offices in Abbotsford, and Sumas Prairie produces a huge proportion of BC’s dairy and poultry products.

The Sumas lakebed is different. The above map of forage and pasture land shows a huge blank spot that closely traces the former boundaries of Sumas Lake. That is because the lakebed’s land is so fertile, it is chiefly used for that rarest of commodities: locally grown food.

Lakebed agriculture is focused on potatoes, sweet corn,  lettuce, carrots, and an array of other crops. Most vegetables eaten by BC consumers are imported from other provinces or countries. But a huge amount of BC-grown produce comes from Sumas Prairie. That’s even the case for sweet corn; while Chilliwack is best known for the summer staple, as of 2016, twice as much sweet corn was planted in Abbotsford.

The value of Sumas Prairie as an agricultural hub—and the resistance to converting it back to a lake—is not only tied to its production.. 

British Columbia is a mountainous province with land that is, on average, not very good for growing crops in a productive, efficient manner. In most managed retreat scenarios, bought-out property owners are able to use money from the purchase of their land to restart their lives and businesses elsewhere. But in BC, the supply of good farmland can’t be expanded.

The greater the footprint of buyouts and managed retreat, the greater the agricultural impact. Although the lakebed area itself is not home to a huge number of poultry and dairy operations—although some exist on the old lake site—the western Sumas Prairie is full of cattle and chicken barns. Buying out large tracts of land along the Nooksack River’s path towards Sumas Lake would wipe out a huge swath of BC’s dairy and poultry production.

NDP and BC United politicians have all stressed the agricultural importance of the land as they reacted to BC Conservative suggestions that the lake be restored. Agricultural organizations have also focused on the region’s farming importance.

But Silver too has also spoken about the food that comes from the land. 

“People point out that food security is something that’s in mind, with the richness of farmland underneath [the lake],” he told The Narwhal. “Initially, it was food security for our people. Now, on the other hand, with the lake gone and the farmland that’s there, that provides food security for a great number of people.”

Silver has said that if the land does not return, he hopes it continues to produce “really abundant” crops.

Economic

Abbotsford’s farms produce nearly $1 billion in annual food sales. The Sumas lakebed produces a large share of that—though likely not a majority. Non-lakebed parts of Sumas Prairie are highly productive, as are farms on Matsqui Prairie along the Fraser, north of Abbotsford’s city centre.

Nevertheless, eliminating the farms located on the Sumas lakebed would have a significant impact on the Fraser Valley’s larger economy.  That effect would be magnified if properties elsewhere in Sumas Prairie were also bought out.

Farming employs thousands of people in the valley. Many more are employed in related industries. The city estimates agriculture supports nearly 17,000 local jobs. Abbotsford is home to a huge variety of food processing businesses, many of which source products from Sumas Prairie. There are also huge businesses devoted to selling tractors, breeding cattle, hauling food, fixing equipment, and irrigating farmland.

The fertility, value, and rarity of the land would aggravate the economic impact of that land’s disappearance. 

Fraser Valley farms with less productive land are frequently dominated by sprawling estates that prioritize living space and greenspace over actual farm uses. But properties on the Sumas lakebed are used for growing crops with maximum efficiency. The land’s value means farmers are incentivized to maximize production through the use of technology, labour, irrigation, and fertilization.

In addition, the disappearance of hundreds of farm properties and businesses would inevitably leave a hole in governmental budgets. The City of Abbotsford would need to find millions in property tax revenue that would disappear when those properties were submerged. And income and corporate tax dollars generated by the workers and businesses that plied their trade on the prairie would also disappear. 

The return of Sumas Lake would make a major shift not just for BC’s agricultural industry, but the governments who depend on its taxation.

Housing

The removal of hundreds of homes from the Sumas lakebed—or thousands in the case of the entire prairie—would add to the already existing pressure on the supply of homes in the Fraser Valley. 

Provincial and local governments have all stressed the need to increase the supply of housing to try to put the brakes on increasingly affordable home prices. Those challenges are both local and national. The 2021 disaster saw the evacuation of about 1,100 homes in Sumas Prairie.  That is nearly identical to the yearly house-building target the province has handed the City of Abbotsford. Fewer homes would be removed if the lakebed alone were to be bought-out, but the reduction in housing units would still be a setback to attempts to increase the area’s the supply of homes.

Mosquitoes

The prospect of the bugs has to be mentioned, in part because they shaped existence before the lake was drained and arguments for its removal. The former Sumas Lake was home to huge numbers of blood-sucking mosquitoes and the less famous, but equally bloodthirsty, midges. They’re one reason why Semá:th people decided to live on the lake at certain times of year, rather than on its shore.

The return of the lake would also return large amounts of mosquito habitat to the region. Inevitably, it would increase mosquito populations. At the same time, the 21st century provides new ways to mitigate those issues. The Fraser Valley Regional District already has a mosquito-reduction program in which larvacide is distributed in prime breeding grounds. The larvacide is a natural product that the contracted company Morrow Bioscience says is harmless to non-mosquitoes. That same program could be expanded to Sumas Lake. It would inevitably increase the program’s annual cost, which was $436,500 in 2022. 

Social

Proponents of managed retreat stress that pulling back from flood-prone areas is often beneficial for the greater good of the community, given the financial and mental costs of recovering from disasters. 

But that doesn’t mean that such change is painless.

Although outsiders advocating for the return of the lake have sometimes skirted the issue, Silver has stressed that the personal trauma that could accompany relocation should be a key factor in any real decision whether to restore the lake. 

But there has not been much of an effort to gauge the opinions of locals about the possibility of the lake’s return.

Although the City of Abbotsford has surveyed residents and business owners, including those on Sumas Prairie, about potential flood protection options, it never asked them about their feelings about managed retreat from the lakebed and wide-scale buyouts. The Current interviewed a Sumas Prairie resident who was evacuated from the lakebed shortly after the disaster: she said that she hoped the government would buy out some properties, but called that desire “wildly optimistic.” Victoria Kuit, who ran the Yarrow Food Hub during the 2021 disaster, said the following summer that a number of Sumas Prairie residents had put their homes up for sale. 

Inevitably, any discussion about buyouts would be impacted by the potential money on offer. But some people will need more money than others. It’s easy to imagine a simple homeowner choosing to take a near-market buyout for their home on the Sumas lakebed. But the owner of an agricultural business that processes food on-site is likely to be harder to convince to willingly part with land that forms an intrinsic part of their business.

The social costs could be mitigated if property buyouts were to take place gradually, allowing people to hold onto their land until they were willing to leave.

Long-term buyouts would require commitment to a full-scale Sumas Lake restoration plan. The prospect of such a long-term plan could itself speed up acceptance of the future return of the lake. With no prospect of increased flood defences, residents and businesses could start making their own plans to find more secure land for their homes and enterprises. 

But such a process would come with immense logistical and political risks. And with some property owners inevitably deciding to stay, it could leave the area in limbo for decades, if not longer. It would also leave the entire plan subject to the whims of different local, provincial, and First Nation governments.

The challenges

Coordination and politics

The pivotal work of restoring Sumas Lake would be a huge, unprecedented, multi-decade project that would require a level of coordination and buy-in from individuals, organizations, companies and governments across both space and time.

It’s not impossible. (The alternative isn’t particularly easy either.) But a plan to resurrect Sumas Lake would be a daunting logistical and political undertaking—especially if it is done in a way that gains the support of Sumas Prairie property owners and denizens.

It may be worth it. It may not.

The future will come at a cost, regardless of what it looks like.

Conclusion

Final questions

The cost to reshape Sumas Prairie’s flood defences come with long-term climactic and logistical questions deserving of skepticism and exploration. Is it worth spending more (maybe much more) than $3 billion to protect a relatively small tract of land that geography, physics, and nature say should be a lake? Is it worth the ongoing risk that even bolstered flood defences will take? And is it worth the cost, both monetarily and socially, of maintaining an artificial plan borne of a historic injustice?

Those questions can’t be answered without also considering other challenges. What does it mean to talk about the return of a waterbody that was defined by the boundlessness of its waters? How far into the western part of Sumas Prairie would the lake be permitted to stretch when the Fraser rises particularly high? Would all flood protections be removed, or would new ones be needed?

There are technical questions related to the costs of redesigning infrastructure. There are economic questions about the value—and cost—of maintaining an industry critical to Abbotsford’s prosperity.

And there are abstract but critical questions for which answers will be elusive, and which were ignored when the lake was first drained. How do you quantify the value of community, and what happens when you disperse it—either willingly or otherwise? What is owed to families who have lived in the same place for a century?

There are also critical questions of democracy. Should the veto on lake plans be given to the City of Abbotsford, the government most directly elected by those most affected, both by flooding and the economic impacts of a shrinking agriculture industry? Should it go to the province, which is on the hook for most flood protection infrastructure? Or should it go to the federal government, which often bears the brunt of financial relief costs following disasters?

The draining of Sumas Lake has left a messy, complicated legacy. Its resurrection is an issue that defies simple and easy answers.

The Sumas Lake to-do list

So you want to restore a lake! After all our explanations, we’ve boiled down what would need to take place to restore Sumas Lake to its former place in the Fraser Valley.

• Purchase land that will become a lake; remove people from homes and animals from properties.

• Demolish structures and infrastructure.

• Design, fund, and build an elevated Highway 1.

• Consider purchasing land that will be regularly flooded because of the lake or because of Nooksack River overflows.

• Consider (and potentially plan and build) future flood defences limiting extent of lake spread onto adjoining floodplains, including Yarrow.

• Consider and plan potential Nooksack River defences.

• Consider the future of the Vedder Canal.

• Consider the need to re-install the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

• Consider the need to re-install the Enbridge natural gas pipeline.

• Consider the need to re-orient BC Hydro transmission lines.

• Address impacts to BC’s agricultural output and the corresponding food security implications.

• Address implications for BC’s farmland supply.

• Build homes to meet the new demand.

• Proactively deal with impacts on local traffic, including to Cultus Lake.

The future of Sumas Prairie is a multi-billion-dollar question. The Fraser Valley Current operates on a much, much smaller budget.

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