Leaving home is a difficult choice for Kristy Wesa, whose housing situation is already vulnerable, but now faces a flood-related evacuation order in Abbotsford, B.C.
The Fraser Valley city is the only area of the province that remains under a flood warning on Friday, after days of heavy rain and rising floodwaters.
Wesa been taking shelter in a motorhome in an encampment along Whatcom Road, but says it’s been a struggle to say warm and dry.
“There’s so much rain, it’s causing our floors to get wet,” she said. “We need a little bit of help.”
Even though floodwaters were expected to peak on Friday, the B.C. River Forecast Centre’s Dave Campbell said Friday that another atmospheric river moving into the region will bring more rainfall on Sunday and into Monday — and that there will be further precipitation throughout the week.
As of Friday, more than 450 properties in the area were already under evacuation order in the Fraser Valley, mainly in Abbotsford, with a further 1,900 on alert.
The Whatcom Road encampment is among the areas where people have been told to leave.
Hear what the B.C. River Forecast Centre is expecting over the weekend
Richard Maloney says he packed up and left his trailer late Thursday night, when officials issued a new evacuation order.
He says he’s “hoping for the best, but expecting the worst” as he waits to see if floodwaters will affect his home.
Maloney says he grabbed what personal items he could and packed up his car. He put whatever else he couldn’t bring with him as high up as possible.
“There’s nothing I can do to stop the floodwater or damage or anything like that,” he said. “I just gotta help the people around me as best I can.”
He says he’s trying to stay positive for now, and that he can worry about what happens to his possessions “down the road.”
“You just gotta play it smart [and] get out of the way of mother nature.”
But shelter space may be limited if more unhoused people under evacuation orders and alerts are forced to move, according to Ward Draper, a pastor with 5 and 2 Ministries who works with unhoused people.
Draper says there’s a gap in the number of shelter beds compared to the number of unhoused people living in the area, including those residing in trailers and vehicles parked in the Whatcom encampment and another at the Cole Road rest stop that is also under evacuation alert.
The latter, which is the larger of the two, is cut off by flood waters over Highway 1 and nearby roads and only accessible from the east side, says Jesse Wegenast, executive director of Sparrow Community Care Society.
He says that’s making it difficult to communicate with people there, should Cole Road be upgraded to an evacuation order.
Sparrow Community Care Society is operating an overnight shelter with 20 beds — with the ability to expand capacity to 50 — that was opened as a part of the province’s extreme weather response program.
According to the B.C. Housing website, there are 13 year-round and extreme weather response shelters operating in Abbotsford, with 267 available beds.
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Wegenast says communication is better than 2021, when an atmospheric river caused widespread flooding and damage across southwestern B.C.
Still, he says it’s still “very frustrating” for him to see that there’s a “jurisdictional gap” in providing 24-hour support for unhoused people in extreme weather.
