'We were lucky': reminder one year on from BC's weather disaster

A year on from the extraordinary and deadly weather event that ripped through British Columbia, a man with ties to our area is hoping people have not forgotten crucial lessons learned out on the road.

The atmospheric river swept in from the west on Nov.14, bringing with it over 270 millimetres of rain in just 48 hours and leaving a $1 billion trail of destruction.

White Rock-based Robert Doolan and his niece, Kassandra Harder, who is from Lake Country, were travelling from the Okanagan to the Lower Mainland and had been detoured in bumper-to-bumper traffic to Hwy 7 because of the Coquihalla closure. Between Hope and Agassiz, a landslide ripped across the highway, sweeping away vehicles just a few car lengths ahead of them.

“All of a sudden we felt a shuddering in the ground beneath us and the trees were swaying in the dark … those turned out to be power poles that snapped like toothpicks,” Doolan told Kelowna10, his voice cracking with emotion as he recalled the traumatic experience.

He got out and told Kassandra to back the truck up as he went about immediately trying to help anyone he could.

“It was like No Man’s Land in World War One,” he explained. “There were maybe six or seven cars just washed away a football field away.

“We were lucky, 100 per cent. We were a split-second behind [those vehicles] and my first instinct was ‘I’ve got to get down there and see if we can help these people.’”

When that became a futile prospect, he and others focused on helping the seven people in three cars that had been washed off the road directly in front of them.

“Two of them ended up in my truck for the night; the lady had swallowed mud and she was coughing up mud,” he remembered.

Doolan, and everyone else who rallied around the stranded that night, would not have known this at the time, but the landslide was not fatal, unlike the one that occurred on Hwy 99, killing four people.

“The aftermath of it, honestly, that was the frustrating part because I was trying to get information on whether there had been any fatalities, and I couldn’t get any. I couldn’t sleep. You see something like that happen and you want to know.”

Doolan knows he, his niece, and everyone caught up in the event got very lucky that night, even though they would end up spending around 16 hours huddled in their vehicles before they were airlifted out by a military chopper.

Be prepared

And it’s that risk of being caught stranded across BC’s rugged and unforgiving terrain that he’s eager to share one year on from the catastrophic events of Nov 14-15.

“I pride myself on being prepared for anything. I have an emergency kit in my vehicle, I always carry blankets, food ,water, tow ropes… and in this situation it was a fraction of what you needed if we were to be there for another couple of days.

“People need to be prepared because help might not get to you. I’ve done that trip at least 200 times. At the very least you need a decent waterproof flashlight, you need extra clothing, extra gas, because we were running the engine to keep warm.”

Doolan often thinks about that night and the helicopter ride out which, in the light of the next day, gave a brutally clear view of the devastating floods that had washed across the Fraser Valley flatland.

And what of the couple he took into his truck that night and, because of their medical needs, were among the first to be airlifted out?

“They were good. They actually invited us over for Christmas Dinner.”