- British Columbia is well known
for its stunning natural beauty,
especially the lush forest 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 swaths of empty land.
This is a huge problem for the future climate,
and residents in cities like Grand Forks B.C.
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."
(soft electronic music)
(water sloshing) (anticipatory music)
- [Tanya] Normally warm spring weather is
something to celebrate,
but in parts of B.C.'s Southern Interior,
it has unleashed destructive floods, the worst in 70 years.
- [Presenter 1] 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.
(Jennifer laughs)
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.
(gentle music)
The flood of 2018 was a shock to the community,
people were not prepared,
the city and the regional district, they weren't prepared.
- [Presenter 2] Three days after the water rushed
into this neighborhood,
more than 100 homes still sit submerged.
- [Presenter 1] Nearly 3,000 people remain
under evacuation order.
(gentle music continues)
- [Jennifer] 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.
(gentle music)
(water whooshing)
- [Presenter 2] Two days ago,
this is how downtown Grand Forks looked.
(sandbag rustling)
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 ruin us
and a lot of other people I think.
- I don't even know what words to use
to describe this right now as
this is way bigger than just the Grand Forks wide of 2018,
this is something that's B.C. wide,
and it's gonna have long term consequences.
(gentle music continues)
(dramatic music)
- 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 gonna make a documentary,
if I'm gonna tell our stories,
I'd better find out what was the cause of the flood.
(dramatic music)
I assumed like a lot of people that the B.C. government
was taking care of our forests in a sustainable way.
I had lived in Asulkan 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.
(dramatic music continues)
The winter of 2017, 2018, there was high snow pack
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 were loggers started telling me that
it's the clear cut logging in our watershed.
(dramatic music continues)
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 being the Kettle 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.
(dramatic music continues)
- What's happening in the boundary country is scary,
it's scared the hell outta me
because there's nobody looking after it,
they're just taking, running it into the ground.
(dramatic music continues)
- Somebody referred me to Herb Hammond
who's a forest ecologist living in Asulkan Valley,
so he was generous enough to do an interview with me.
(dramatic music continues)
- 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.
(dramatic music continues)
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% faster.
So you have 30% deeper snow packs that melt 30% faster,
that creates spring floods and fall droughts.
(dramatic music continues)
- 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 gonna get here in April,
but we can control
how many trees we're taking off the landscape.
(dramatic music continues)
- We're looking at a severe cut block.
This block is roughly 1,200 and somewhat hectares.
What you have here now is no retention,
and hence you're gonna get lots of floods
and lots of silt and gravel and sand in the watersheds.
(dramatic music continues)
Yeah, and that's pretty massive, aye.
(dramatic music continues)
There's one guy that says it's Armageddon.
- 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.
(gentle music)
(water splashing) - Oh man.
- [Presenter 2] A times firefighters
had to swim through the water
(window knocking) (firefighter sighs)
polluted with toxic chemicals and sewage.
- Oh my goodness.
- [Presenter 2] This is the first time Kyle and Jaylee Piper
have seen inside the home
where they lived with their 11 year old daughter.
- [Kyle] My daughter's room destroyed.
(dramatic music)
This is the neighborhood of North Ruckle
and it was hit really hard by the flood.
All of this neighborhood, there's about 100 houses total
that are being demolished
in making way for flood infrastructure.
So about 100 people, about 100 families
had to find new places to live.
(gentle continues)
- 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 do?
I got no more house,
I got a mortgage to pay and they're tearing down my house."
(gentle music continues)
- The city received about a 50 million 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 $150,000
before the flood hit.
- Well, they're only offering me 40, that's $110,000 loss.
I don't have another 25 years to do it all over again.
(water splashing)
- 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 felt incredibly alone and I'm tired, I'm exhausted,
and I'm at the point now where I just wanna move on.
(upbeat gentle music)
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.
(upbeat gentle music continues)
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 gonna start to work together."
(upbeat gentle music continues)
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
'cause that's who benefits right now,
that needs to switch to ecosystem's health,
and that's gonna 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 frontline communities
have some decision making power
around the management of the forests,
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 are all aiming for the same things.
We've gotta move forward,
we've gotta move ahead, our lives depend on it.