Residents in several areas of North Vancouver spent Tuesday digging out from a swamp of mud and rocks, shifting sandbags and pumping out their basements after a heavy rainfall caused creeks to overflow their banks and turned quiet streets into rivers Monday night.
Up to 17 homes were evacuated and at least 20 homes suffered water damage. Mud and water from Hastings Creek also washed into Argyle Secondary, damaging about eight classrooms and shutting the school for the day.
Most residents were allowed back into their homes on Tuesday — in some cases after district crews dug paths through the mud to their front doors. Argyle was expected to re-open on Wednesday after a crew of about 30 worked to clean up the flood damage.
Flooding started just before 10 p.m. Monday night after about 20 millimetres of rain fell in just two hours.
Mark Schmidt, who lives on Croft Road, said he was driving down his street at about 9:30 p.m. Monday night when he noticed a culvert was starting to overflow on to Fromme Road. “In the next few minutes it got exponentially worse,” he said, bringing boulders and trees with huge amounts of water on to the nearby streets.
District fire crews and utilities staff arrived and tried to divert the flow of water but “they really couldn’t do much,” said Schmidt. “The water was just overpowering everything.”
“On the low side of Croft Road there was a lot of water dumping into basements.”
Crews spent the night trying to clear culverts and using sandbags, backhoes and lock blocks to try to redirect water away from homes.
“I’ve never seen the water that high in Hastings Creek,” said Roxanne Davies, who lives a block behind Argyle school. “I didn’t sleep all night.”
Mike Cairns, assistant fire chief for the District of North Vancouver, said when crews arrived at Fromme Road around 10 p.m. “It was just a river. There was six to eight inches of rocks and eight to 12 inches of water going down there.”
Crews began evacuating some homes on Fromme and Croft roads. Most residents went to spend the night with friends or relatives.
“There’s probably at least 20 houses affected with some water in their basement,” he said. “Some are very substantial damage. Some had two to three feet of water in them.”
Houses on Kilmer and Fromme were some of the worst affected.
Liz Bell, principal of Argyle, said she got a call and arrived at the school around 11 p.m. Monday night. “We had water coming in to the building,” she said. Two wings of classrooms — including the special education rooms and music wing — had water and mud flow into them. “It was spread over a very large area,” she said.
Cairns said the problem started when a catch basin that normally drains into a large pipe to Lynn Creek became blocked by debris brought down by heavy rains.
By morning, district crews had dug out and trucked away about 20 tandem dump truck loads of dirt and debris.
Similar situations of plugged culverts, and creeks overflowing their banks caused flooding in at least five different areas of the district, including neighbourhoods near Dempsey, Grousewoods and Deep Cove, he said.
Further drama was created around midnight when a tree fell over on Platt Crescent, uprooting live underground electrical wires and tearing a gas line as it went down. “We evacuated eight houses there,” said Cairns.
By Tuesday morning, Lynn Valley residents were beginning to dig out, many of them arriving with shovels and wearing rubber boots as they worked to help their neighbours.
Jane Ruegger was one of them. “It wasn’t until we came out walking our dogs that we saw what was going on,” she said. “We thought we’d pitch in and help.”
District of North Vancouver Mayor Richard Walton said that’s typical of Lynn Valley. “Neighbours are immediately in the middle of the street helping neighbours,” he said.
Walton was out early Tuesday morning, visiting some of the residents whose homes had the worst flooding.
Two houses on Kilmer were extensively damaged. “There are people who are hurting today,” he said. “It’s not the way one expects to spend a night and wake up in the morning.”
Walton said people in North Vancouver are always on high alert during heavy rains, and remember all too well the Berkley landslide and previous floods that resulted in loss of life.
Engineers were out Tuesday to assess the damage. But Walton said it’s too early to tell how bad that’s going to be. “We could end up with a significant amount of road surfacing and sidewalk rebuilding,” he said.
Chris Hough, who lives on Croft, said watching the whole event was a sharp reminder of the power of Mother Nature.
“It was really mind boggling to watch the whole thing unfold,” he said. “You don’t appreciate the force behind water until you see something like that happening.”
