So this is what it feels like.
During the summer wildfires of 2017 that destroyed property, forced people from their homes in the area and exhausted the town’s emergency response resources, The Spotlight was inundated with calls and messages from former Princeton residents desperate for news about their friends and family members.
“Being here” during the fire crisis was not much fun. However “not being here” was, apparently, in some respects worse.
Two days ago the city of Brantford, Ontario - about ten minutes down the highway from where my family lived growing up - declared a state of emergency after the Grand and Nith Rivers flooded.
Houses have been severely damaged, there are pictures on social media of cars awash and abandoned on residential streets and neighbourhoods have been evacuated.
There is flooding throughout the entire watershed. A three-year-old near Orangeville was swept out of its mother’s arms and lost to the raging currents.
The attached video shot yesterday shows the back of my old newspaper office, The Paris Star, with water and ice rising above the downtown windows. Unbelievably nobody has thought to turn off the electricity.
Princeton BC and Paris Ontario have much in common. They are both the conflux of two rivers, and they both have areas known as “the flats.”
In Paris the flats were not named for the founding family. They were just called “the flats” and Hiram Capron named two streets for himself on “Quality Hill” - and then named smaller streets after each of his many, many children.
(Prolific founders. Another similarity.)
Our family lived on the flats during the last serious flood in the town - in 1974.
We were coming home from school, and taking the bus over the high-level bridge we could see out the windows the main street, with boats motoring up and down pulling people from stores and upper level apartments.
The few of us “flat children” had to be taken to a teacher’s home for the night, because our own houses were too close to the river.
Seven-year-olds have active imaginations and more than four decades after the fact, the fear and certainty that my parents and brother had drowned and nobody had the courage to tell me can be called up in a heart beat.
It was not knowing, and not being there, that was so hard.
So this is what it feels like.
Reading what can only be described as piecemeal and inadequate news reports of the flooding - and following what appears to be mass confusion resulting from a lack of preparation - puts Princeton’s state of emergency and everything surrounding it in a different light, for me.
Two days after the river breached the banks in Brantford, Ontario and homeowners went scurrying, the mayor is still “trying to co-ordinate” the efforts of volunteers who have stepped forward to help.
Two days after the fire started outside of Princeton in July there was a fully equipped evacuation centre operating 24-7 out of Riverside Centre. Evacuees were staying in motels - not sleeping on gymnasium floors. Food vouchers were already circulated for local restaurants. GSAR was doing its job of evacuation alert - not the already over-taxed police department. Fortis BC was on the ground and in the air. And the co-ordination of at least four local fire volunteer departments to support BC Wildfire and protect our smaller rural communities was outstanding, to say the least.
Also so importantly, there was a well-defined process for disseminating information from the province the RDOS, and the municipality.
Yes, Ontario has many things to recommend it as a place to live.
But BC could sure teach those people something about how to run to disaster.
To report a typo, email:
publisher@similkameenspotlight.com.
andrea.demeer@similkameenspotlight.com
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