Crossborder Nooksack flooding talks have yet to start, a year after they were announced

Eighteen months since the flooding of Sumas Prairie, international talks about the Nooksack problem have yet to begin in full. Instead, officials have spent the last year just figuring out who will be at the table.

In March of 2022, the British Columbia and Washington State governments announced they were creating a “Nooksack transboundary flooding initiative.” Details about just what exactly that meant would be announced that spring, a press release promised.

A year later, the public is still waiting for details, with the two governments yet to decide just who will take part in talks. Last week, Rick Glumac, the BC government’s political liaison to Washington State, admitted to The Current that “progress has been slower than anyone I think would want.”

The Nooksack River’s propensity to spill north into Canada has been known for years. In the 1990s, following a severe flood that swamped western parts of Sumas Prairie and closed down Highway 1, Washington State and British Columbia announced the creation of an international task force to find solutions to mitigate damage from future disasters.

That task force aimed to improve co-operation and find solutions that could benefit residents on both sides of the border.

But the task force stopped meeting in 2010. As 2021 showed, they failed to develop any solutions that could mitigate flooding that impacts both countries. The failure was emblematic of the political complexities that have influenced previous decisions regarding the river.

As The Current has reported in depth, Whatcom County officials have repeatedly decided not to undertake work that would prevent water from leaving the Nooksack and flooding north at Everson, Washington, just south of Abbotsford. That’s because the release of water north into Canada and, eventually, into the Fraser River, functions as a pressure relief valve. Stopping flooding at Everson would inevitably aggravate flooding downstream within Washington State—unless major flood prevention work was undertaken elsewhere in Whatcom County

Because of that, Washington officials have previously declined to build levees near Everson that could help protect Sumas Prairie. And Canadian officials—who have only occasionally taken an interest in Nooksack flood prevention concerns—have not been able to alter the Americans’ calculation.

Soon after the floods, then-Premier John Horgan tapped Glumac, a Port Moody MLA, to represent the province’s interests in discussions with Washington State. The “initiative” suggested by the Washington and BC governments would try to find solutions to help residents on both sides of the border.

But while both Whatcom County and the City of Abbotsford have been busy with work trying to plan for and mitigate a future flood, conversations at more senior levels have yet to start in earnest.

Glumac, along with officials from both sides of the border, have attended discussions and fact-finding visits both in Abbotsford and Whatcom County. But those have been led by the municipality and county. More formal cross-border discussions and negotiations about funding and flood-planning have not yet taken place.

“We are planning on putting together a table—it’s in the works right now—of elected officials,” Glumac told The Current. Progress has been slow, Glumac admitted, “but we have to keep in mind that there’s a lot of stakeholders involved across both sides of the borders.”

Glumac isn’t overstating the complexity of the issue. In addition to the provincial and state governments, more than a half-dozen municipal governments along the path of the Nooksack have a stake in any decisions that affect north-bound flooding. There are affected First Nations on both sides of the border. There is Whatcom County, the jurisdiction that handles most of the flood prevention work in Washington State. And both federal governments also usually play a role to play in international negotiations. There are also agencies, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that are used to having a strong voice in disaster prep work.

As talks about talks have continued, the last year has seen both the City of Abbotsford and Whatcom County work on concrete plans for how to prepare for a future flood. In Abbotsford, that included choosing a preferred design that will be able to route floodwaters from the Nooksack to the Fraser River. In Whatcom County, it involved buying out properties with federal funds to reduce the damage from another northbound flood (and inevitably allow that water to get to Canada faster).

Glumac said it’s not a problem that the crossborder talks will occur at the same time, or after, Abbotsford and Whatcom County are making key decisions meant to shape their flood-mitigation approaches for years to come.

“This is a multi-prong approach,” he said. “There’s no one solution that’s going to solve the problem. It’s multiple solutions, some short-term, some longer-term.”

The challenge has been that it’s in the interest of both countries to see as much of the Nooksack’s floodwaters end up on the opposing side of the border. But Glumac suggested that while preventing all future northern floods might not be on the table, talks could focus more on a way to at least limit the scale of those events in the respective countries.

“The problem has been that it’s been like this all or nothing kind of solution that’s been discussed,” he said. “Either we leave it alone and all the water goes up to Canada or we put a dike there and all the water goes down[river].”

Whatcom officials have previously left the door open to potentially reducing the amount of water allowed to flood north. Glumac acknowledged that Canada could encourage that by offering to help pay for improvements that would help mitigate the impacts within Whatcom County.

“I don’t think anybody wants an all-or-nothing solution,” he said. “We need to share the risk, we need to share the cost and to work together.”