16 ms·

For just a bit of context/anecdata, I'm talking to my brother who lives in Vancouver and he wasn't even aware this was a problem. The road closure[0] on hwy 1 n

• zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  I live in Vancouver and had no idea until a friend in another country saw the news and asked me about it. Not to say people elsewhere in BC weren’t impacted (one town had to evacuate) but the media is not painting an accurate picture.
  • lhorie 5y ago
    Yeah, the evacuation order in Abbotsford[0] seems like the real news to me. [0] https://www.abbotsford.ca/alerts/evacuation-order-and-alerts-issued-localized-areas https://www.abbotsford.ca/alerts/evacuation-order-and-alerts...
    • soperj 5y ago
      Merritt seemed big as well.
  • cf100clunk 5y ago
    Perhaps the picture being painted by the media is not being accurately assimilated by you? This is real, and magnitude of the circumstances is dire.
    • arcticbull 5y ago
      Dire in what way? Vancouver still has the YVR airport, a seaport, ferries, a downtown float plane airport and both road and rail access to the US. There will be some impact to prices, I imagine, while the road and rail links to the rest of Canada are rebuilt.
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        I'm totally unfamiliar with the geography there; are peripheral cities and towns around Vancouver as unaffected as Vancouver itself? I can imagine it happening in some places I've lived, where the central city is humming along just fine and everyone inside the city is blind to the 50% of the population around the city that just got stranded and cut off from supplies.
        • mmartinson 5y ago
          More or less. Greater Vancouver suburbs largely unaffected. Farther out peripherals (Abbotsford, Hope) badly flooded. All regional towns and cities beyond those cut off.
        • singingboyo 5y ago
          Depends what you consider peripheral. The places within a couple hours big enough to notice as you drive through are basically Lions Bay/Squamish going north, Maple Ridge/Mission on the 7, and Abbotsford/Chillwack/Hope on highway 1 out the Valley. Chilliwack and Hope might be cut off, though I think it's possible to get there via minor roads/unusual routes. Abbotsford is partly flooded, but areas that aren't should be accessible. Lions Bay/Squamish and Maple Ridge/Mission are fine, as far as I know. So if a 1-2 hour drive is the limit, then parts of Abbotsford/Chilliwack/Hope are pretty miserable right now, but it should be fairly localised. On the other hand, you can argue that most of Southern BC is "peripheral" to Vancouver, despite parts being 4-5 or more hours away. Those parts will have more issues, since you start getting into places where the only connections are (were) the highways that flooded and washed out.
• JPKab 5y ago
  Wait a minute now: I've been to Vancouver before, but I"m completely ignorant about the supply chain there. We're talking about a metropolis of 2.5 million people. What's the impact on food supplies, fuel, etc? Very curious. Is it primarily coming up from the US???
  • wheelinsupial 5y ago
    There are two areas under discussion here. Vancouver, which goes by a bunch of different names including Metro Vancouver Regional District, is the 2.5 mil that you’re talking about. The second piece is the Fraser Valley Regional District, this is everything else east of Vancouver up to and including Hope. This is another 600k people. FVRD is where the impacts are so far. I mentioned in another comment that I’m in Chilliwack and gas stations are empty and grocery stores are also empty. Hoarding happened really fast today. The roads for resupply are shut down. As far as I know, the main hubs are in MVRD, but probably not City of Vancouver proper. Nothing can get passed Abbotsford going East. There are roads past Hope that have also been destroyed (collapsed bridges and two lane roads completely gone). There might be ways to go north and around, but where I am it’s isolated on both sides. I am visiting this area and am stuck until things are sorted out. Previous estimates have said there could be 20-30 billion dollars in economic impact if there is a severe flood in the region.
    • vkou 5y ago
      To clarify on that last point - there is a single pumping station that is working to keep the Fraser river from turning half of the city of Abbotsford into a lake. That station is under threat of failure, due to rising floodwaters. If it fails, that's it. Half the town will be under ten feet of water, that has nowhere to drain. I don't mean 'nowhere to drain until next week' - I mean 'nowhere to drain, period.'
      • wheelinsupial 5y ago
        > Nowhere to drain, period Because the Sumas Prairie, the location with the imminent threat of flooding, was originally a lake. It was drained in the 1920s to claim farm land for the Fraser Valley. This is reversion to the natural state.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• woah 5y ago
  Most of the population of Canada is within miles of the US border. For any given city, connection to the US is probably much more important than connections to other parts of Canada.
  • TMWNN 5y ago
    As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. (<https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>)
• time_to_smile 5y ago
  You could just as easily infer from this anecdata that people that live in cities tend to be very insulated from the infrastructure and larger support systems required to maintain their way of life... ...but Everything is Fine is an equally strong conclusion.
• skrebbel 5y ago
  I'm surprised there's no shortages yet because trucks can't get to the city. Or does Vancouver import most non-regional goods from the US (and not the rest of Canada) anyway?
  • justsid 5y ago
    The shortage is the other way. The rest of BC gets most of its produce from the lower mainland. I live in Kelowna (funny to see a local news site on here), and our stores have basically no produce because we can’t get anything from the lower mainland. Fun times.
    • cf100clunk 5y ago
      Conversely, the outward flow of Okanagan wine products will be sharply affected. For example, the market for Okanagan ice wine in Asia is huge. Also, when the Lower Mainland growing season is done, the produce shipped from Chile and Peru comes into Vancouver's ports and goes out across western Canada and the North.
      • CydeWeys 5y ago
        At least ice wine is shelf stable for years, right? It's not like it's gonna go bad; it'll just be a little bit of a delay until it can be sold.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • 14 5y ago
    Just saw a post from my cousin in Victoria the store shelves are empty it’s crazy.
  • bobthepanda 5y ago
    the Trans Canada Highway in some parts is an undivided 2-lane road, so it wouldn't be surprising for freight to choose to take something like I-90 instead, though you would have to go through border checks.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rsync 5y ago
  "So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way." Where do truck shipments come into Vancouver from ? Is it all through the US/CA border ?
  • cbhl 5y ago
    Isn't Vancouver a port city? I imagine there'd be more truck shipments out, eastwards towards the rest of Canada.
    • arcticbull 5y ago
      They should be able to continue, albeit delayed, via the US. Should be possible to head south into Washington State and re-enter Canada at Oroville-Osoyoos.
      • rrix2 5y ago
        sure, they just have to hope the north cascades highway is open when the snow-levels are already lowering from these storms. Usually that highway is closed during the winter season
        • Thrymr 5y ago
          Closed for the season: https://wsdot.com/travel/real-time/mountainpasses/North-Cascade-Hwy https://wsdot.com/travel/real-time/mountainpasses/North-Casc...
  • lhorie 5y ago
    I wouldn't worry about shipments into town. Suez was out for like a week and the world managed more or less just fine. LA port is backlogged to the wazoo but nobody is starving because of it. My understanding is that the Vancouver situation is only 1-2 days old so far, so there's probably not that much reason for alarm unless damage to every single artery turn out to be serious. Worst comes to worst, the US road is still open.
• skeeter2020 5y ago
  The big issue is that the port in Vancouver is now essentially an island. Rail is impacted by this as well.
  • arcticbull 5y ago
    It's essentially a peninsula, it still has road and rail links to Washington State.
    • bialpio 5y ago
      It's effectively become a Canadian version of Port Roberts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
      • iso1631 5y ago
        Except Point Roberts (not Port) is just a residential area that isn't self sufficient in any way, and doesn't have thousands of containers arriving for shipping inland
        • bialpio 5y ago
          Sigh, brain lag. At least the wiki link I pasted was correct. Nothing to add to your point about self-sufficiency, my intent was to draw parallels to the comment I was responding to. ("It's [Vancouver] essentially a peninsula, it still has road and rail links to Washington State." <=> "It's [Point Roberts] a peninsula, it still has road links to British Columbia.").
    • adrianpike 5y ago
      Northbound I5 is flooded in Washington, however, so still not a great route for the next day or so: https://twitter.com/wspd7pio/status/1460623860944932864 https://twitter.com/wspd7pio/status/1460623860944932864
  • Scoundreller 5y ago
• amatecha 5y ago
  I live in Vancouver - my coworkers and family were very aware of this, watching footage online and exclaiming at the brutal nature of the weather and landslides we experienced yesterday. Never seen this many roads closed in BC in my nearly 4 decades living here.
  • cronix 5y ago
    The whole upper pacific coastline is experiencing it. There is a lot of flooding along the Oregon coast as well with cars/trailers floating away and evacuations. Intense rains for days at a time. I mean we get a lot of rain here, but this has been pretty crazy and constant.
    • AutumnCurtain 5y ago
      Let's hope it migrates further south and relieves some of the California drought. Any meteorologists have a sense of the weather patterns at play here?
      • cbsks 5y ago
        According to this meteorologist “Drier-than-average winter still most likely outcome for most of California” https://weatherwest.com/archives/11748 https://weatherwest.com/archives/11748
        • mmgutz 5y ago
          Average winter seems a distant memory in Cali.
          • ctrager 5y ago
            2017 and 2019 were big Sierra snowpack years, double average. I don't mean this to be a comment on long term trends.
      • waiseristy 5y ago
• vmception 5y ago
  The floods arent the issue the highway washed away
• jacquesm 5y ago
  "The boonies", does that include Calgary? There is quite a bit of road traffic between Vancouver and Calgary via Kamloops and Banff. Or did you mean just West of the Rockies?
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Heh, I think they meant everywhere between Vancouver and Toronto
  • lhorie 5y ago
    Sorry, "boonies" might have been a bit of a callous choice of words. Reading more about it, it sounds like the folks at Abbotsford, Hope and surrounding areas are having a pretty lousy time right now.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      To me the 'boonies' in Canada is west of Timmins, East of Wawa and North of Desbarats in Ontario, and anything North of Kamloops in BC. The roads in BC are very critical infrastructure, there aren't that many of them to begin with and there are a lot of choke points on the downslopes of mountain ranges where you have to pass through, unfortunately it looks as though that's where the road outages are. Canada is an amazing country scenery wise, but it is also a very thin veneer of civilization on top of a very rugged countryside and it doesn't take much to turn it from workable into unconnected islands overnight. Let's hope that they manage to keep the power running and some way to keep those communities supplied because with winter on the way that can get ugly really quickly. Canadians are usually pretty self sufficient but without roads I'm not sure how that would work.
      • pbourke 5y ago
        > west of Timmins Yep. Sudbury to Kenora is some lonely road with a few “no services next 150km” stretches
        • cmrdporcupine 5y ago
• ryanisnan 5y ago
  As an anecdote, I live significantly East of Vancouver, but most of our goods come from the port of Vancouver. Things are going to get really interesting, as these roads will take a while to be repaired.
• iainctduncan 5y ago
  This is complete bullshit. EVERYONE is affected. Honestly, just read the BC news. If they think they aren't affected, then they don't understand BC supply chains and haven't noticed... yet.
  • curmudgeon22 5y ago
    I'm in Burnaby. It was really rainy and windy for a couple days, but I haven't been meaningfully impacted so far. For sure it was a major storm with some major impacts, but I think most people in the lower mainland weren't severely impacted.
    • cf100clunk 5y ago
      If you mean for just today for someone in a less-impacted area of the Lower Mainland, that's an acceptable if minimalist answer, but saying "most people" is very problematic in the light of a huge amount of evidence from primary sources.
    • iainctduncan 5y ago
      I guess they haven't read yet on how damaged the supply chain is going to be then. This is not "we'll fix it up in a few weeks" road damage, it's more like major shipping roads in BC are going to be affected for through the worst of the winter here.
      • lhorie 5y ago
        To be fair, I just found out about this literally from the link at the top of this page, a couple of hours ago. Not exactly enough time to become an expert in supply chain logistics in a province I don't even live in. I'm reading now that there's already some stress due to displacements from the Lytton fire earlier this year, and displacements from Abbotsford, Merritt, etc are not gonna help the situation. I'm still trying to piece together the wider scope of the incident and don't yet have a good sense of what the overall damage looks like (though it increasingly looks like it isn't merely "a few key bridges happened to have flooded, it'll be fine once the water recedes" and it's more like "there are several landslides blocking roads along the route to Calgary and we're gonna be scrambling to staff the clean up efforts in time for winter"). On the one hand, you just need enough room for a truck to pass through, dirt road carved by a tractor as it might be, in order to establish a supply line. On the other hand, given that some communities barely only ever had that in the first place, I imagine many might need to figure out plan B arrangements.
• tehjoker 5y ago
  Doesn't this affect deliveries of needed supplies to the city? I guess the port and railways are not impacted, but I would think roads carry some significant cargo.
  • inasio 5y ago
    Some (not sure if all) railway tracks were also affected [0]. There are two tracks that go into Vancouver (CN and CP have each their own I believe), not sure if both were affected. Keep in mind that the train also works as a pipeline of sorts for the Alberta oil, and a ton of coal comes from the eastern BC border by train. And on that note, I heard speculation that the actual pipelines may have also been affected. https://twitter.com/TranBC/status/1460391772304064517?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1460391772304064517%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fbritish-columbia%2Fcoquihalla-trans-canada-highway-damage-1.6250235 https://twitter.com/TranBC/status/1460391772304064517?ref_sr...
  • katbyte 5y ago
    Pretty sure most supply chains for this part of the country usually start in Vancouver, not so much terminate. Vancouver will be fine I imagine
• csel 5y ago
  Son has a hockey tournament next week in Vernon, BC. Due to road closure, Google Maps is sending me to Washington State and back into Canada. Absolutely wild. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Surrey,+BC/Vernon,+BC/@48.8612973,-122.1841165,8z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x5485dc034d3fa75b:0xd28b4898abd598e0!2m2!1d-122.8490125!2d49.1913466!1m5!1m1!1s0x537dd8e746d9fce3:0x8fd4e1b6add1e987!2m2!1d-119.2720107!2d50.2670137!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Surrey,+BC/Vernon,+BC/@48.86...
  • pbourke 5y ago
    I’m sure you’re aware, but just in case: bring tire chains if you’re crossing Washington mountain passes as they can sometimes be required.
  • throwawayswe 5y ago
    Sorry, that route won't work either. The I-5 in WA had closures last night and could close back again anytime: https://twitter.com/wsdot_traffic/status/1460419932131250177 https://twitter.com/wsdot_traffic/status/1460419932131250177
• kazinator 5y ago
  Oh your brother will feel the pain when the Whole Foods on Cambie runs out of those cheap organic bananas from northern Alberta.
• pomian 5y ago
  If you live in Vancouver and are staying there it is not an issue. But there is an amazing huge scale issue of access to the interior of British Columbia. 2 out of 3 highways from Alberta are closed. That means you have to drive either an ~ extra 500 miles north, or south, to travel 50-100 miles west or east. There is no way to travel across a whole region of a huge country. Similar to closing all east west highways in southern California, from the Mexico border to lake Tahoe. Sure , you can drive down to Mexico, across to Tijuana, and back up.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    Which highway to Alberta is open?
    • Phithagoras 5y ago
      Highway 16 and the 43 (2 on the BC side) are still open. They're probably referring to the 16 because the 43 is pretty out of the way. The 1 and 3 is still open on the AB side too, though avalanches were/are causing trouble in Rogers Pass in central BC. any drive conditions in BC can be checked at https://drivebc.ca/ https://drivebc.ca/ in AB https://511.alberta.ca/#:MyRoutes https://511.alberta.ca/#:MyRoutes Anyone who was seriously motivated to get to the rest of Canada could drive through the US or take a ferry to Vancouver island, drive to Port Hardy, take a ferry to Bella Coola or Prince Rupert and drive to the rest of the country from there. It would take forever and the roads from Bella Coola and Prince Rupert are notorious. Vancouverites say the Coquihalla is the gnarliest road in Canada, and it just shows that they've never seen the rest of their country. The 2 lane, gravel, Heckman Pass on highway 20 is nothing like the paved, seperated 4-6 lanes of the Coq.
  • jonwest 5y ago
    I live in Vancouver. It absolutely is an issue. It’s a huge issue. We are the primary port for western Canada. All shipments that would have been routed via road and rail travel through Vancouver now need to be rerouted either via air or through the USA. Gas shipments are going to be complicated. Food shipments are going to be complicated. These highways that are closed due to collapse are built into the side of mountains and require significant engineering testing in order to be deemed safe to rebuild on, not taking into account the amount of engineering that’s required to actually safely and sustainably rebuild them. Suburbs of Vancouver (Abbotsford) are essentially underwater. It is patently false to say this isn’t an issue for people who are living and staying in Vancouver. Hell, even major highways within Vancouver have been shut down. These are much more temporary shutdowns than the primary highways out of town, but still require respecting in order to repair and restore which limits travel.
• Kluny 5y ago
  Almost everyone in Vancouver, Vancouver Island, all over BC really, has flooded basements and other stuff to deal with. My school closed down due to power outages, for example. The road to the local landfill has washed out. Half of my classmates were without power last night, and one of them is on the wrong side of a mountain pass and will miss class today. Our teacher has decided not to bother trying to get to campus and we're back to Zoom school.
  • stanmancan 5y ago
    I wouldn’t say almost everyone; majority of people are fine but there’s definitely many people who have to deal with flooding and water damage.
    • Kluny 5y ago
      Itt: People telling about how the flooding has directly and severely impacted their lives, and commenters who got lucky explaining how it's actually not a big deal.
      • UnFleshedOne 5y ago
        Don't let empathy blind you from an accurate assessment though.
      • stanmancan 5y ago
        I mean I live in the lower mainland and I know exactly 0 people who have personally experienced any damage or loss. Given that I have friends all over the Lower Mainland and Interior BC and family up and down Vancouver Island it’s a decent sample size. I have empathy for those who are going through hell right now but I’m just pointing out that your assessment of “nearly everyone” is way off base.
        • Kluny 5y ago
          Meanwhile I’ve got relatives evacuated from Merritt, classmates who won’t be able to attend class for a week, and almost everyone I know lost power over the weekend. Facebook is full of people asking for fans and pumps to dry out their basements (including people I know personally). You say look at the bigger picture but you’re counting your personal experience as the best indicator of it. I’d suggest the news is showing the bigger picture.
• perl4ever 5y ago
  - If it is possible to come and go via the US, I wonder if a special allowance will be made for that - I vaguely remember some major city in Alaska was said to have no road to the outside world? Google Maps shows a route from Anchorage to Juneau, but it goes through Canada.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  Yarrow got evacuated today so even though it's not raining atm, it's not yet over.
• max-ibel 5y ago
  at some point the city might run out of things ...
• yashap 5y ago
  I’m a Vancouverite, and this is a pretty narrow, short sighted view. Sure, some people aren’t very impacted, but a tonne of people are. Lots of people who need to travel around the province but can’t, who were travelling and can’t return home, who can’t ship things in or out, whose basements are flooded, etc. For just one story, my wife’s boss was travelling in the interior (drove there). Doesn’t have his passport because he wasn’t planning to leave the country. Is now stranded, trying to decide whether to abandon his car and fly home, so he can get back to the small business he runs, or try to wait it out so he can drive home in god knows how long. Tonnes of people facing impacts like this, or much worse.
  • mjevans 5y ago
    They might be able to get the car shipped (train or transfer service), even if that takes a while. If the closure is longer than X (based on work, hotel, etc) then it might be cheaper to fly and also have the car shipped; or even sold if they have extras.
    • yashap 5y ago
      Yeah, I’m sure they’ll figure it out - it’s a tricky situation, but not an impossible one. Many, many people are in far worse situations with this flooding, e.g. having their homes or businesses flooded. Just wanted to share a personal example of why I strongly disagreed with this comment: > So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way.
• darksaints 5y ago
  There was a case study I read in some supply chain courses a while back that was about supply disruptions in supermarkets due to a temporary but unforseen border closure somewhere in Central Europe. I don't remember exact numbers, but the relationship between the number of missed supply trucks and products out of stock was roughly exponential. After a single truck, there were like a dozen products out of stock. But after a second truck, there were over 400 products out of stock. By the fifth missed truck, 20% of the entire store was out of stock. Since most stores have distribution centers that can break up replenishment into small increments, grocery stores typically use a method of inventory management that "tops up" inventory levels on a scheduled basis. High demand items might get replenished once a day or more, while some might get replenished on 2, 3, 4 day intervals all the way up to monthly intervals for low demand durable items. Replenishment schedules are staggered on a per-SKU basis, so that the number of trucks per day is roughly constant. The short story is that delayed trucks might be a tiny annoyance, but a full supply disruption can cause utter chaos in less than a week. If reroutes through the US aren't facilitated, you can expect to see all of the most commonly purchased items in your grocery store out of stock far sooner than you expect.