Tuesday - April 9, 2024 - 'Drastic' climate consequences for the Nooksack

🌧 High 9C

Good morning!

In December of 2020, I met with Grace Kennedy in a very windy park in north Chilliwack to plot out the future. As I considered the launch of The Current in the coming months, I knew that I would need some help and Grace, then the editor of the Agassiz-Harrison Observer, was at the top of my list. Although she harboured some reservations, Grace joined me soon after FVC launched and helped turn it into the publication you know today. Life happened, though, and in 2022, Grace took a leave to expand her family.

That left us with a Grace-shaped hole. So we did what anyone would and filled it with … another Grace, this one a Giesbrecht by way of Fort St. John. Yes, things get a little confusing when you replace one person with another of the same name. Anyways, this week we are finally getting our original Grace back. It’s a fun and exciting return even if, during our morning meetings, I’m now reverting to hockey-style last names.

You’ll hear from Grace Kennedy in this spot tomorrow. Grace Giesbrecht, meanwhile, will be with us until the end of the month, after which she will depart to carouse throughout Europe on what sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime trip. If she makes it back from Prague, or survives her work-stay detail in the Netherlands in one piece, we hope to eventually bring back her and her tales of northern BC farm-life (and, of course, her great journalism).

Onward!

– Tyler

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

Climate change will cause Nooksack
flood risk to ‘increase drastically’

In June of 2021, Canadian policymakers were not exactly waiting with baited breath for Evan Paul to finish his master’s thesis.

Two years of data analysis, writing, research, and cataclysmic flooding later, Paul’s findings have billion-dollar implications for the future of the Fraser Valley. Paul’s work suggests the Nooksack River will become much more likely to flood in the years to come, and that those floods will become more severe over the coming decades.

Paul’s thesis was overseen by a Western Washington University professor who is the authority on the Nooksack River, and its findings should shape how highways are built, how dikes are constructed, where pump stations are added, how emergency management plans are written, and how vast sums of money are spent. But first, policymakers, politicians, residents, and business people have to actually read the research—and know it exists.

Today, Tyler revisits a 2021 story and calls up a young researcher with critical insight on the future of the Nooksack River.

Related

Need to Know

🚧 A proposed 42-storey tower on 200 Street would become the tallest building in Langley, if approved [Langley Advance Times]

🚨 Someone fired bullets into a home and ‘multiple’ vehicles in Mission last week [Global]

🤼 A professional wrestling event is returning to Abbotsford this weekend [Abbotsford News]

👍 A Good Samaritan helped a woman in a rollover crash in Chilliwack avoid serious injuries, while paramedics helped revive her husband according to a fundraiser [CityNews]

🚑 A crash in rural Chilliwack left two trucks in a ditch [Fraser Valley Today]

🎉 The University of the Fraser Valley kicked off its 50th anniversary celebrations [UFV]

🔥 Increasing numbers of forest fires in the Lower Mainland are worrying experts—and Mission’s forestry officials [Vancouver Sun]

👉 Chawathil Coun. Aaron Pete says First Nation governments need oversight from the public—and media [The Hub]

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SPONSORED BY ABBOTSFORD TECH DISTRICT

The future of food

Agriculture is a crucial part of our local economy, and the Fraser Valley produces half of BC’s food.

That’s why it’s so important that we train the next generation of tech-savvy farmers and food producers and set them up for success right here in Abbotsford.

Learn more here.

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The Agenda

Drug deaths trending down

In the first two months of 2024, 37 people have died in the Fraser Valley due to toxic drugs. Most of those deaths were in Abbotsford, where 17 people died. Nine people died in Langley, and five in Chilliwack. The remaining six deaths were in the region’s smaller communities: Mission, Agassiz, Harrison, and Hope.

According to the most recent coroner’s report, which has data up until the end of February, the province is seeing fewer drug-related deaths this year than it did by this point in 2023. Provincially, overdoses are down 11% from where they were a year ago. That trend seems to be similar in the valley, where the number of deaths went from nearly six per 100,000 people in early 2023 to just over three per 100,000 people in February. Most of that decrease comes from a decline in deaths in Chilliwack.

It’s still too early to know if that trend will continue. The number of deaths each month can vary significantly, particularly in smaller communities. Although the number of deaths provincially could be going down from 2023, it is still up significantly from where it was years earlier. In 2016, the Fraser Valley saw 98 people die because of toxic drugs; in 2023, that number was 246.

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Catch up

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