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british colombia is well known for its studying natural beauty especially the lush forests of old growth trees but did you know that over the last few years much of the landscape has undergone clear cutting this is where forests are logged and left with large squats of empty land this is a huge problem for the future climate and residents in cities like grand forks bc are facing the consequences of clear cutting head-on join us in this next film to see how this community is at risk of flooding and much more from ramshackle pictures this is waterlogged normally warm spring weather is something to celebrate but in parts of bc's southern interior it has unleashed destructive floods the worst in 70 years the city of grand forks was the hardest
hit of two dozen communities that declared states of emergency over the last few days it sits where the granby and kettle rivers meet and both are expected to surge again these are the sandbags from 2020. tried to protect my house again didn't really work that well 2017 i had a foot and a half of water in my house 2018 i had four feet of water in my house the water was up to here in the house in 2018. the flood of 2018 was a shock to the community people were not prepared the city and the regional district they weren't prepared three days after the water rushed into this neighborhood more than 100 homes still sit submerged nearly 3 000 people remain under evacuation order this is the kettle river it was massively fast
and powerful during the 2018 flood a lot different from this peaceful calm little stream that it looks like right now two days ago this is how downtown grand forks looked even at those businesses that were lucky enough to stay mostly dry it's all hands on deck today we're just trying to keep it dry so we can open up eventually but who knows this might uh this might ruin us and a lot of other people i think i don't even know what words to use to describe this right now this is way bigger than just the grand forks flood of 2018. this is something that's bc wide and it's going to have long-term consequences
when i saw what was happening to the community in 2018 when i saw friends and neighbors and the shock that they were going through i thought this is a story that needs to be told so within a few days i started filming a documentary so can you tell me how you felt when you first saw this i was just devastated and then i thought well if i'm going to make a documentary if i'm going to tell our stories i'd better find out what was the cause of the flood i assumed like a lot of people that the bc government was taking care of our forests in a sustainable way i had lived in the silicon valley and i knew that they were logging but i traveled mostly on the main roads so i didn't see the extensive clear cuts the winter of
2017-2018 there was high snowpack in the mountains above here in our watershed and we also had a lot of heat in april of 2018 so there was sort of a combination of factors but people in town who are loggers started telling me that it's the clear-cut logging in our watershed a watershed is all the streams and land forms and the underground water flow that flows into a drainage basin our drainage basin is the ground bee in the cattle river and our watershed is 8 000 square kilometers of forests when those trees are removed from the landscape when they're clear-cut off the landscape there just isn't enough trees and vegetation and intact forests to hold the water the way it used to what's happening in the boundary country
is scary it scared the hell out of me because there's nobody looking after it they're just taking running it into the ground somebody referred me to herb hammond who's a forest ecologist living in the slokan valley so he was generous enough to do an interview with me if you fly over the kettle river watershed you're left with your mouth hanging open it's incredible the amount of clear-cut logging that has occurred there what happens in this watershed now in those clear cuts and young forests up until the time they're probably 70 or 80 years old most of that precipitation that used to be moved across this landscape that stays put as snow and in the spring because it's directly exposed to sunlight it melts about 30 percent faster so you have
30 percent deeper snow packs that melt 30 percent faster that creates spring floods and fall droughts we've had greater than average flooding here in the past three out of four years and it's a combination yeah climate change is a contributor climate change isn't going away clear-cut forestry is the one factor that we can actually control we can't control how much snow is coming down we can't control how hot it's going to get here in april but we can control how many trees we're taking off the landscape we're looking at a severe cut block this block is roughly 1 200 and some odd hectares what you have here now is no retention and hence you're going to get lots of floods and lots of silt and gravel and sand in the watersheds
industrial forestry the way we do it is completely incompatible with maintaining water quality quantity and timing of flow there's no way around that it's not that we're anti-logging the point is that we want our forest to be managed in a different way so that we're still as a community reaping economic benefits but we're not doing so much damage at times firefighters had to swim through the water polluted with toxic chemicals and sewage oh my goodness this is the first time kyle and jaylee piper have seen inside the home where they lived with their 11 year old daughter my daughter's room's destroyed this is the neighborhood of north ruckel and it was hit really hard by the flood
all of this neighborhood there's about 100 houses total that are being demolished and making way for flood infrastructure so about 100 people about 100 families had to find new places to live it's like somebody come along and hit you with a baseball bat in the side of the head i mean it's a shock right and you go down on your knees what do i got no more house i got a mortgage to pay and they're tearing down my house the city received about a 50 million dollar package including funding from the federal and provincial governments it's for flood mitigation and home buyouts but it's under the condition that the homes are assessed at what they're worth after the floods which in many cases isn't very much in watson's
case her property was valued at one hundred fifty thousand dollars before the flood hit well they're only offering me forty that's a hundred and ten thousand dollar loss i don't have another 25 years to do it all over again i got flooded again in the spring of 2020 even though once again i was prepared i had sandbagged my house but i got a few inches of water in there so going through flooding three times in four years the emotional impact it was traumatizing i've had a lot of nights where i cry myself to sleep where i've felt incredibly alone and i'm tired i'm exhausted and i'm at the point now where i just want to move on it's not a good feeling to be leaving here it's not a good feeling to feel like i've been forced to leave i'm really gonna miss
stan and the friends that i've made here this whole thing was completely avoidable all of the pain that the people have been through the cause of it is greed it's just downright greed over the decades what's driving me and what's keeping me hopeful in a big way is the connections and the solidarity that i've experienced it really does make me hopeful when i talk to loggers and union reps who say yeah we need this change we're all seeing it and we're all going to start to work together i would like the legislation in forestry to be changed so that the number one priority is ecosystem health right now the number one priority is corporate profits because that's who benefits right now it needs to switch to ecosystem health and that's going to
protect the people as well the other thing that i would like to see is that there's a decentralization of decision-making when it comes to forests and that people who live in the front-line communities have some decision-making power around the management of the forest and of course that includes indigenous people too indigenous communities have to be able to have a say in what's happening on the land everybody in local communities needs to start to come together we need to shift the conversation loggers and environmentalists need to start talking to each other and realizing that we're all aiming for the same things we've got to move forward we've got to move ahead our lives depend on it
