An insider's view of why the last Nooksack task force failed

Sumas Prairie was failed once by politicians. The question is whether they will fail it again.

In the early 2000s, a group of BC flood experts presented an animation to provincial bigwigs previewing the consequences of a major Nooksack River flood. But a lack of political will and support left an international task force convened to prevent such a disaster unable to actually accomplish its goals, according to Neil Peters, BC’s former Inspector of Dikes and a former co-chair of that task force.

Today, that failed task force has a new successor. And Peters, who left government work in 2016, says he is optimistic that it may finally find success. But, he warns, it will take political will, creativity, perseverance—and a lot of money.

On Tuesday, we wrote about Peters’ suggestion that a floodway south of the Sumas Lake bed could be cheaper and safer than Abbotsford’s preferred $3 billion plan to protect Sumas Prairie. You can read that story here.

The task force

FVC: Can you tell me about how the task force that you chaired operated, why it encountered challenges, and if you think this new table differs and could offer some hope or prospect for something different?

Peters: I was involved right from the November ’90 flood. I was out there in that event. One of my colleagues was chair the first seven or eight years of that trans-boundary process, and then I took it over, and we had what was called the Environmental Cooperation Council, which was an agreement between the premier of British Columbia and the governor of Washington.

It was kind of similar to the agreement that they've signed [last year], except it didn't have quite so many parties. … So that was kind of the overseeing body. But it came along a few years after the Nooksack flooding, it had a number of different issues under its umbrella, groundwater contamination and Puget Sound water quality, all those things. But the Nooksack Task Force itself was mostly a technical group and we got along just fine, and worked through the modeling and hydrology studies and whatever.

I think we definitely ran into some technical challenges. I can expand on those a little bit, but our biggest challenge was political awareness, funding, support and appreciation of the issue. The Environmental Cooperation Council was active for, I don't know, almost 10 years, but then they kind of fizzled out, and with government restraints and funding priorities, we just couldn't get any traction on the BC side to provide money for supporting the process. We couldn't even get $25[,000], $50,000 to do a little bit more modeling or anything. It was just one these things where government loses interest because it's not in their face. And almost the same on the American side, except I think the Americans have a lot less interest in solving this issue than British Columbia, because while they have the overflow corridor—the town of Sumas, Wash., on the Whatcom County Board—there's only a couple representatives in the overflow corridor versus a dozen representatives along the Nooksack towards Bellingham Bay. So the political thing there is weighted far more to maintaining the status quo than solving anything for Canada. So there's not really much political interest on the American side to resolve the overflow issue.

Editor: We have reported extensively why reducing Canada-bound floodwaters is considered ‘not politically feasible’ in the United States. Find that story here. 

The international negotiations

FVC: And that obviously means that if you're going to have some improvement, it needs to be driven by Canada.

Peters: Exactly and that's where the 1990 event maybe wasn't big enough or dramatic enough to drive the process for more than a decade. It's of interest, I think, that exactly what happened in 2021, the Nooksack International Task Force group, which I was part of, we presented in 2003 an animation of exactly what happened in 2021. So it wasn’t through lack of awareness. It's just political… It’s just funny. Again, I'm an engineer, I'm not a politician, so I don't quite understand how politics works, but it lost cachet over the years, and without Canada driving it—and of course, British Columbia, the province has to be the key player. We once considered bringing in the IJC—the International Joint Commission—to see if that would assist this process. But we had invited them to a meeting, and we had those discussions to see how that might work. But … that process requires an invitation by both the Government of Canada and Government of the USA to the IJC to invite them in, and they will then take on a project, but they also need to be funded as well. So there wasn't interest by the Canadian government, and certainly not by the American federal government, to invite the IJC in. So that was kind of a non-starter.

FVC: I've been asked about whether something like the Columbia River Treaty would be possible, and it's always been like: it seems like it would be possible, but you need the feds on board.

Peters: Yeah. So that requires a very strong, broad interest from both senior governments. And as we discussed earlier, there's not really that much political incentive on the American side to resolve this. I mean, they would like to resolve the Nooksack flooding problems that they have throughout the Nooksack system, but the overflow is just one aspect of it, and cutting off the overflow makes the other part worse, so they don't really have an incentive to resolve this.

FVC: When you guys presented the animation in 2003, who did you present it to?

Peters: It would have been to the co chairs of the Environmental Cooperation Council, which would be the deputy minister of Environment for British Columbia and the director of ecology for Washington State.

FVC: The politics is interesting because we’re talking about the province and the feds, but the one government with the most at stake is Abbotsford, and just before the 2021 flood, they kind of caught on and were talking about trying to restart the conversations. There wasn't much concentration on the topic when I I started being a reporter in Abbotsford in 2014 or 2015. It was interesting to see the conversation restart around 2019 or so. But even then, the discussion was about how do we convince the Americans to build a dike at Everson which, given the history and given what we know now, seems like it would never be a possibility, right?

Peters: If the question is, “What's the best way forward from now, based on the previous experience of my previous experience on the task force,” if British Columbia and Abbotsford and Canada want to solve this issue, number one, they have to realize they have to drive it, because nobody else is, the Americans certainly aren't.

The Americans are very co-operative and, in terms of working together, they're great. They‘ve got great technology and all good people. So these groups that they've set up, I think, have the potential to solve this issue. And if they develop state of the art hydrologic and hydraulic model which is seamless across border, and then they take the next step of assessing risks on both sides of the border, so if they are using the same methodology in hopefully one study, so that $1 damage in Abbotsford is comparable to $1 damage in Lynden and Ferndale. So you have the cost/benefit to evaluate different options, and then you go look at options and evaluate them. They would consist of everything from building a dike at Everson to contain all the flows so that there's no overflow to a very modest hydraulic structure that might limit overflow in some way possibly, maybe to the volume experienced in 1990 where the Western prairie floods but the lake bottom doesn't and the interceptor dike doesn't breach. But you should have a range of conditions or or no control at all, and then leave it to the Canadians to build either the Abbotsford preferred option with the giant pump station, or this floodway idea at huge cost.

But I think what Canada and British Columbia need to understand is that if there's no mitigation of the overflow on the American side, the 2021 event and worse can happen again, and mitigate that. You need one of these massive solutions, which cost in the billions. It's not the most efficient way to deal with this issue.

So once you have this modeling and the risk assessment, I think you would then, I mean I don't know how to sell this politically, but just from a straight efficiency point of view, if Canada would put forward $500 million/$1 billion dollars, instead of spending 2 billion on this side, we give the Americans a third of what we might spend to solve the problem and see what they can do on their side to mitigate their issues, and then control the overflow with that mitigation. And then it's sort of a joint solution, but it means Canada giving Americans money for flood protection on the American side. And I don't know how you communicate that or sell that to Canadian taxpayers. But from an efficiency point of view, that would be the way to solve it.

FVC: Abbotsford had talked about potentially funding a fairly cheap dike near Everson. The challenge, as you say, is the downflow costs that come when you build that dike. It seems to me like the issue is partly that you can do the math and say, “OK, Canada can also help cover some of those costs,or kind of financially make the Americans whole.” But the big trick, it seems to me, is convincing the Americans; it can't just be a break-even thing for them, it seems, because if it's just a break-even thing, they're probably still better off with the current situation. Bringing them to the table to improve things in Canada is almost inevitably going to hurt them. So you have to really make it worth their while to do something up there.

Peters: That's right. I mean replacing the bridge on I5, stuff like that—raising I5—is quite challenging. And putting in new enhanced diking all the way from Everson to to Bellingham Bay to cope with these massive flows that climate change hydrologists tell us are coming.

Hope for the future

FVC: That's why your concept kind of makes sense, almost on a political level, wherein you kind of accept that this is going to be the reality—and I guess the Abbotsford concept does it too, in a sense—and you just kind of have to get on with it. If you can loop the two things in together, you just kind of deal with it and accept it's maybe not a perfect solution.

I’ve got one more quick question. Given your history and your background with all of this, I won't ask you to foresee the future, but are you optimistic that things will actually get done this time eventually? (I said I wouldn’t ask you to predict the future but I realize that’s kind of asking you to predict the future.)

Peters: I think the setup that they have, it makes sense. And I think one of the weaknesses, maybe of the previous task forces was that First Nations and Indigenous groups were not involved as much as they are now. And that kind of gives a little more broader political continuity, if you will. You know, they can't just stop as easily as we faded away before. Maybe this will have more staying power because it's a very broad-based setup, which is good. but I think in the end… the challenge is Canada has to drive it, and the solutions are going to be expensive, and that takes real leadership from particularly British Columbia. I mean, Abbotsford is just a municipality with limited resources, as you know. I mean, they're vital to implementing and working on this one, but without a really, really strong leadership from the province, particularly, this won't succeed. But I certainly hope it would.