When Salt Spring’s Broadwell Road washed out during the first big rain of the year, forcing its closure at Duck Creek, it was an inconvenience, if arguably a significant one for many.
When Channel Ridge Drive looked like it too might be lost to an overbanked stream, the dozens of homeowners temporarily stranded up the hill — undoubtedly following along with news of the horrible floods returning to parts of the Fraser Valley — might be excused for a moment or two of climate panic.
It’s one thing to see shifting weather patterns on paper, but quite another to live through them. Recent years have borne out climate models from the Capital Regional District that forecast more rain, falling in fewer, more extreme weather events. The similarly predicted impact of successive dry springs on tree mortality was seen across the islands only Monday, with short bursts of wind leaving trees and branches across wires and roadways — and sending emergency responders scrambling to allocate their limited resources.
While our islands were spared the kind of damage seen in the Lower Mainland, infrastructure problems either resulting from or revealed by 2021’s atmospheric river event have led to several projects on Salt Spring and the Southern Gulf Islands, from a seemingly constant stream of relatively modest improvements on smaller island roads to more substantial upgrades like the Isabella Point Road rebuild in 2022-23 and the new bridge now being constructed over Cusheon Creek.
The substantial infrastructure resilience work we’ve seen in the last few years on our islands feels unprecedented, and nothing like the shovelful-of-cold-patch, easy-on-the-budget solutions we’d grown accustomed to expect. The shift is necessary, and welcome.
On Channel Ridge — and in other island neighbourhoods that depend on aging culverts and old ditches to keep them connected to emergency services in a crisis — fretful islanders should again be excused, this time from wondering if the work will be done before they are truly stranded.