Chapter 11: Earth and Water

Argentine novelist and poet Julio Cortázar once wrote that he may have been too trusting in “la fiel caricia de mi tierra”—“the faithful caress of my land.” In a similar vein, many of us in Johnson’s Landing perhaps allowed ourselves to be beguiled into believing that our mountain actually cared about us. Every evening Kootenay Joe Ridge exhaled a fragrant downdraft of warm air that sent smoke and sparks from our beach fire out across the lake. In the soft light of morning a perceptible breath of cool air rose from the water, crossed the meadow and floated up the hill as the mountain inhaled. We loved our mountain; it seemed a benign protector, sheltering us and nurturing our needs with its living waters. Blinded by the conviction that I would always be safe under Kootenay Joe Ridge, maybe that’s why I failed to heed the signs—the changes in the creek, the odd smell, even Loran’s emails.

Of course, it’s easy to see now that, besides being exhausted from my trip to England and saddened by my mother’s declining state, I was thinking like a child, lulled by the naïve temptation to anthropomorphize a lump of rock. Adam Gopnik, on BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View, once described this kind of magical thinking: “We had faith in the benevolence of the universe, in a compact the world had made with us that all things turn out well.” But adult truth sweeps that trust away, as Gopnik goes on to explain: “The world makes no compacts with you at all. You can only hope to negotiate a short-term treaty, or armistice, which the world, like a half-mad monarch, will then break, just as it likes.”

The mountain above Johnson’s Landing is neither good nor bad; it does not love, hate, protect or neglect us. The world moves forward through time and space, indifferent to the life it carries on its rounded back, oblivious to our prayers, opinions or dogma.

We in the Landing drew comfort from the history of uneventful habitation since Algot Johnson bought the first acreage on the hillside in 1906—a fraction of a nano-second ago in the lifespan of Kootenay Lake. No natural disasters had befallen Johnson’s Landing in our modern history apart from a few nearby forest fires and the occasional snow avalanche partway down Gar Creek. People relaxed in a false sense of security. False, because the mountain has moved before, several times, in the distant past. And Gar Creek has been the conduit for other floods and debris flows. The signs were visible if you knew how to find them.

Peter Jordan, a geotechnical expert with the Ministry of Forests, told us that he’d identified an ancient landslide path on Kootenay Joe Ridge, much larger than the 2012 slide, and two smaller, more recent slide paths. His team used light detection and ranging (LIDAR) equipment, which gives an accurate map of the surface topography as if no trees were present. These telltale scars, dating from a period more than 12,000 years ago, were invisible until modern technology enabled scientists to scrutinize the forest floor beneath the dense canopy of trees.

Our beach at the mouth of Gar Creek, it transpired, also held evidence of prehistoric events—an alluvial fan created by previous debris flows and floods. In a 1998 report to the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection entitled Terrain Stability Inventory, Alluvial and Debris Torrent Fans, Kootenay Region, the Gar Creek fan was identified as a potential debris flow area. And in 2004 it was noted as such on Ministry of Environment flood hazard maps.

In 2009 the Regional District of Central Kootenay (RDCK) described the Gar Creek fan as a “Non-Standard Flood and Erosion Polygon area” in its Floodplain Management Bylaw No. 2080. But they didn’t share this information; they didn’t tell us, the people who lived there. The RDCK didn’t make the information public or readily accessible, so that we, living in the middle of this “non-standard flood and erosion polygon area,” had no idea there might be a potential hazard. Had we applied for a building permit it would likely have been refused on grounds of flood and debris flow risk.

I wonder if I would have reacted differently if I had been aware of our home’s precarious location. If I’d read published reports and registered, even subconsciously, the phrases “debris flow hazard” and “flood risk,” I wonder if I would have responded with alarm to the indicators I observed in Gar Creek on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning—the stink, the turbid water that became a mud slurry, the exceptionally high flow.

If I’d known, would I have leapt up, heart racing, and grabbed Ozzie, phoned Jillian, asked to use their truck to carry stuff to Kaslo? Would I have alerted Renata and told her, “You can’t stay here, it isn’t safe,” and loaded some of my bags into her car? If I had known, would I have…? These sorts of questions and scenarios torment the survivors of any catastrophe. The anguish can be agonizing, because we always think we should have known.

In 2012, however, no central repository for known hazard information existed for our area. After the slide, the geotechnical experts recommended in their report to the RDCK that “Residents and the general public should be made aware of and/or understand how to access existing landslide hazard information, new landslide reports and new landslide hazard maps.”

The long-awaited final geotechnical report was made public at a meeting in Argenta on May 23, 2013. RDCK: Johnson’s Landing Landslide Hazard and Risk Assessment was commissioned by the RDCK, and paid for by the provincial government. The report’s findings were devastating to us all, but particularly to certain property owners in the Landing.

The risk of another landslide was such that parts of Johnson’s Landing are unacceptably dangerous for human habitation and can never be reoccupied. There is a one in ten risk in any given year that a landslide will occur in the area of the Gar Creek channel and alluvial fan. The report rates eighteen private properties at risk from landslides in the future. Five properties are in a very high hazard zone, rated 1:10 to 1:100; nine properties lie in a 1:100 to 1:1,000 (high) hazard zone; and four properties are in a 1:1,000 to 1:10,000 (moderate) hazard zone. The main road into Johnson’s Landing, where it crosses Gar Creek, and the public road down to the beach are in a high hazard zone. As a result, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure closed the lower portion of the beach access road in 2013.

The report called the Johnson’s Landing landslide “unprecedented in recent history in this region with respect to its large size.” Only three other known landslides of a similar order of magnitude have occurred across southern British Columbia—all of them since 1999. And climate change projections for the Kootenay region do not bode well for the future.

What triggered this landslide? The ground water table was very high, for one thing, and that reduced the effective strength of the soil. And the rainfall in June 2012 was record-breaking, a one-in-a-hundred-year event. The snowpack on the mountains that winter was also heavier than usual. Then, incredibly, a week before the landslide, the weather turned dry and sunny. How could a weather change, which seemed so marvellous when I returned from grey, dismal London, wreak such havoc?

That week temperatures rose to over thirty degrees Celsius. While I lay basking on the deck, watching the swallows, the abrupt heat wave hastened the snowmelt, which seeped underground through the porous limestone and emerged as springs that fed a boggy area at the slide source. Saturated from above, this deep pocket of material was also inundated from below. During that week Gar Creek was flowing at possibly its highest level in forty years. The snowpack, the deluge of rain and the heat wave: three ingredients in a recipe for disaster.

And the future? The technical information is complicated for the layman, hard to comprehend, because it involves projections based on risk factors found during post-slide searches. The geotechnical team found fractures and tension cracks, aquifers and springs that might, over time, weaken the soil. And apparently a potentially unstable volume of glacial and colluvial deposits. At the time of the first landslide, a block of earth and debris dropped twenty metres then stopped, possibly held in place by bedrock. This “intact block” is considered likely to form future landslides, small or large.

In their report, the geotechnical team calculated the risk of a 50,000-cubic-metre landslide at 1:50, and a 96,000-cubic-metre slide at 1:100. A future landslide of similar magnitude to the 2012 slide (320,000 cubic metres), unimpeded by trees, might extend farther across the Johnson’s Landing bench. Of course, there are unknown factors. Will the unstable earth move again? Will extreme weather caused by climate change increase groundwater levels?

Christopher and I sat in the meeting, sombre and concerned. I looked around the room, at Osa and Paul, Loran and Gerry, Jillian and John, Kate and Harvey. Our faces were blank, our minds reeling in the pieces of information that we could most readily grasp. Few of us had been given an opportunity to read the 102-page report before the meeting.

Eleven recommendations included increasing the height of the ridge at the bend in Gar Creek near Petra Frehse’s property, establishing a simple landslide monitoring program, and creating communication plans and protocols to update residents and visitors about local conditions during periods of increased landslide hazard. Those times of greatest danger will likely be the wettest months: June and October. The report also recommended restricting residential development in moderate, high or very high hazard zones.

We looked at each other in despair.

The risk analysis left property owners like the Madills, Harvey Armstrong and Rachel Rozzoni in a quandary. Large tracts of their properties were now uninhabitable and could not be used for any purpose. Yet, and here’s the rub, they remain the legal owners, and liable for the land. Although property taxes and insurance still had to be paid, the land was virtually valueless and unsellable. How could this be?

Insurance companies refused to honour home insurance policies on the grounds that landslides and land subsidence (the ground giving way) are excluded from coverage. Faced with this horror, it seemed reasonable to everyone, especially those caught in the trap, to hope that the provincial government would expropriate the land of the three or four most affected residents, provide some fair compensation and revert it to the Crown. But no such offer was made.

Harvey Armstrong, for instance, lost the use of most of his land and all the buildings. The property lies in a total exclusion zone, with a 1:1,000 risk of being impacted by another landslide. He told me, “It used to be worth $200,000 and now it’s worth nothing. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is I am still the owner and I am liable if someone goes onto my land and gets hurt. I get sued. So I must have liability insurance. And I’m still paying taxes.” If the landslides had been a one-off event, Harvey could have continued to use his land. But the potential for another landslide puts him in limbo.

Rachel Rozzoni and Dan Tarini had house insurance on their property, but the insurance company refused to cover their loss. After Rachel was forced to evacuate, the insurance premium leapt from $2,600 to $4,000 per year because the house was standing empty. “We paid our premiums for nearly ten years,” she said. “They [the insurance company] could have given us back that last year’s premium, but they didn’t help us, or even make a donation as a sign of goodwill.” From the Disaster Financial Assistance (DFA) program, Rachel and Dan received 80 percent of the value of their house (excluding land and outbuildings), conditional on the building being demolished, which it was.

The Madills did not receive “a dime” from their insurance company either. And DFA provided only limited compensation. “It’s intended as a hand-up, but it doesn’t lift you up very far because things cost a lot,” Jillian said. The DFA program fails rural property owners because the land itself is a major asset. The Madills received no compensation for their outbuildings, workshop, tools, guesthouse and seven hectares of land, three of which now lie under the landslide.

The DFA program has paid out about $578,000 to Johnson’s Landing claimants but the program has shortcomings and has been criticized as not suited to the needs of rural communities. Despite BC being a predominantly rural province, the DFA rules give the appearance of having been designed with urban residential environments as the point of reference.

John Kettle, chair of the RDCK, agrees that Johnson’s Landing property owners have been placed in an untenable position. Through no fault of their own, owing to a hazard emanating from Crown land, they have lost the ability to use or develop their properties. The situation is unique. No legislation exists to properly address it. In October 2013, Kettle sent a letter to Lori Wanamaker, the chief operating officer of the BC provincial government. In part he wrote:

In my opinion we can and must do better than this. Additionally, with the apparent climate change, this may very well be just the beginning of adverse weather related events throughout the province. God help us if we don’t learn and adapt from the Johnson’s Landing disaster. This horrible event should be the benchmark by which applicable legislation is generated to address all of the ambiguities and legal nuances we have confronted over the past 15 months. This is not about money but about how we as elected officials, tasked with protecting the public interest and lives, address the reality of climate change for future catastrophic events in British Columbia.

Kettle argued for new provincial legislation to establish a BC Disaster Relief Fund that would compensate residents for their losses (redress of mortgages, taxes, insurance) and recoup the costs incurred as a result of so-called acts of God (evacuation, relocation, etc.). But no such legislation was enacted.

In a letter to residents in December 2013, Kettle explained why the evacuation order for large tracts of Johnson’s Landing still remained in force: “With the existence of an unstable scarp containing approximately 800,000 cubic meters of material, and the lack of long-term monitoring data necessary for accurately determining the likelihood of a future landslide… there is an unacceptable risk to life and property associated with occupation of the hazard area at this time.”

Kettle renewed the evacuation order weekly for two years, his action reviewed by the Attorney General’s office in the Ministry of Justice (the only ministry that could override the RDCK order), and every week they signed off on it. The provincial government and the RDCK also met periodically to discuss issues that remained unresolved.

The RDCK sought long-term solutions from the provincial government prior to lifting the order. In John Kettle’s opinion, the 2012 landslides, and the unstable material hanging above the community on Crown land, are the Crown’s responsibility, not the RDCK’s, and the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) is responsible for implementing the eleven recommendations contained in the geotechnical report. Some believed the provincial government would dearly like to hand these responsibilities to the RDCK and local taxpayers. Two years after the landslide, on July 31, 2014, with most of these issues still unresolved, the evacuation order was finally lifted.

Andy Shadrack, the RDCK director for Johnson’s Landing, expressed disappointment: “As far as I’m concerned, the provincial government has absolutely failed the people in Johnson’s Landing who, through no fault of their own, lost their houses. If this was somewhere in the Lower Mainland, it would have been settled and the people would have been bought out.”

When will Johnson’s Landing’s next landslide happen? How bad will it be? Not knowing the answers is, of course, deeply unnerving. When it rains heavily in June and Gar Creek flows fast and turbid, nobody feels entirely safe. What does this uncertainty mean for the future of Johnson’s Landing, a community that has lost a quarter of its population through death and displacement? In the aftermath, remaining residents grapple with isolation, loneliness and grief, as well as fear about the future. How do you heal a community that’s been told it cannot trust its very environment?

The community began its healing by working together in rebuilding what was destroyed. For the residents on the south (most affected) side of Gar Creek, a vital priority obsessed their waking hours: to re-establish a reliable water source for drinking, domestic use and irrigation.

John Lerbscher spearheaded the various initiatives, and is now an acknowledged community expert on the “water saga.” He and his wife, Marlene, bought the old MacNicol pioneer homestead in 1996 and made it their permanent home in 2003. The house stands near Algot Johnson’s log house, Harvey Armstrong and Kate O’Keefe’s home. Both properties lie safely clear of the landslide and the evacuation zone. John, a chemist by training, is semi-retired from his career as a principal scientist.

In the immediate aftermath of the landslides, John bought a 660-litre water tank and a gas-powered pump, put the tank on an old truck and delivered water to neighbouring households. BC Hydro then stepped in with the donation of a larger tank. But these were just temporary fixes.

The first serious water project was an initiative by Buddy Carlson to replace the water intake in Gar Creek, connecting to a new water distribution box that fed the existing waterlines. Over six ten-hour days, from July 26 to 31, 2012, Sean Brenton and Duncan Lake dug a trench, Bob Yetter and others built a water box, and the Village of Kaslo generously donated a $500 “torpedo”—a specialized serrated pipe, designed to take water out of a creek.

On July 30 and 31, twenty volunteers laid the pipe in the trench and backfilled it by hand, using shovels. Duncan Lake was a key person: courageous and willing to work without hesitation in a high hazard zone; it was just three weeks after the landslides, the creek bank was unstable and no one knew how dangerous the channel might be.

Unfortunately, this first water intake failed after a couple of months. Rocks fell and cracked it, and the unstable creek bank sloughed in, filling the intake with mud.

The second initiative involved an aerial water pipe suspended above the creek, which drew water from Moss Beard Spring on Gerry Rogers’s property. Osa Thatcher’s son Toby, together with Ruth’s grandsons Ed and Will Burt, engineered and constructed the line, which fed the existing water distribution box.

Again, Duncan Lake dug the trench, this time in atrocious weather, with the slide material saturated and slippery. The trench filled with water and the volunteers were soon caked in mud. John said it looked like a scene from a World War I film. It was dangerous work, some would say foolhardy, but the project was completed successfully, and the new line supplied the south-side community’s water needs for the next two years. Even though it was intended only as a temporary stopgap, it gave residents breathing space while other, permanent solutions could be considered.

“That spring has been a blessing,” John told me, “and we owe Gerry and Linda an ongoing vote of thanks. Despite the disruption it caused to their lives, they have enabled the community to have water, and that’s a gift.”

The longer-term water saga, however, will be running for some time yet.

The Madills’ empty house sits at the edge of the slide area, one year on.

Photo: Louis Bockner