Just an hour after Chris Ashurst finished a morning of frigid cross-country skiing, an atmospheric river descended upon Haida Gwaii from the south, swinging the temperature 15 degrees “almost into T-shirt weather” and setting off a massive melt that nearly led to calamity on the craggy archipelago off B.C.’s north coast.
That was Sunday morning. By the evening, Mr. Ashurst, a volunteer emergency co-ordinator for the North Coast Regional District, was one of more than 2,000 residents stranded on the north half of the main island when the lone highway was washed out by a flood.
The provincial government and local First Nations leaders said Tuesday afternoon that the rains had let up enough for repairs to begin on the main coastal highway and a single lane reopened later in the evening.
The authorities had prepared to install a temporary bridge over the washed out portion, but water levels dropped enough Tuesday for them to begin to install a culvert.
However, for more than two days, the north end of the main island was cut off from the southern half, which is home to the ferry and airport that transport people, food and fuel from the mainland.
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Mr. Ashurst and his partner had planned to catch a ferry Monday morning for a ski trip on the mainland. They set out in their pick-up truck at 5:30 a.m. to take a logging road that curled around the island to the ferry terminal in Skidegate, but a kilometre onto the path they stopped at a puddle nearly half a metre deep.
Then a logger in a bigger truck backed up toward them and said the path ahead had fallen trees and water flowing across it at double that depth.
“He was like, ‘nobody’s going that way,’ so we went back,” Mr. Ashurst said.
No major injuries were reported during the flooding and aftermath, though the emergency room in the north side’s largest community of more than 2,000 people, Masset, has been shutting down periodically because of staffing shortages.
Still, two days of being severed from civilization tested residents on the north half of the island, with stores being emptied of dairy and other essentials and the region surviving on one functioning gas pump, Mr. Ashurst said.
“We get zero groceries up here without the road – it all comes on the ferry – so I’m not going to town. We’re going to eat the food in our pantry until this all passes,” Mr. Ashurst added. He has lived outside Masset for 22 years.
No properties have had to be evacuated, but roughly 10 families stranded from getting to their homes by the flooding are being given vouchers for food and, in some cases, accommodation, according the provincial Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Ministry.
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On Dec. 27, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship issued a flood warning for Haida Gwaii and the region surrounding the north coast port city of Prince Rupert, with up to 15 centimetres of rain expected through Monday.
Billy Yovanovich, Chief Councillor of the Skidegate Band Council, said members in the southern part of the main island were also helping house their northern neighbours in need.
His elected council oversees the village of Skidegate in the south and another council oversees Masset in the north, both working within the governance structures of the wider Haida Nation.
“It is just such an extreme one-off, both communities have been really helpful,” he said.
Chief Councillor Yovanovich said his main concern with flooding is the ongoing erosion of Haida Gwaii’s shores, which his nation is trying to fight through various projects.
Yet, his biggest takeaway from the past few days is that everyone on the ground co-operated beautifully, a fact he says may surprise some convinced that reconciliation in B.C. with Indigenous people has gone awry after recent court rulings on competing property rights.
He noted that this fall the B.C. Supreme Court cemented the Haida Nation’s agreement with federal and provincial governments to take over Aboriginal title to all one million hectares of Haida Gwaii, once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands.
“We’re still able to coexist: Nothing’s going to change that way. We’ll still all work together during crises and during day-to-day living,” he said.