Too little and too late

Fraser Valley people
tell how homes lost

By HAL

.
At Dewdney Crossing
in a sullen brown lake.

GRIFFIN
the highway ends, abruptly,

Beyond the rise at the railroad

tracks where this time last year the grey gravel. stretch-
ed, heavy with dust, across Nicomen Island, houses stand

in their drowned gardens,

windows- And over it all
lessly.

the river washing at their
the rain falls endlessly, piti-

It streams from. the rubber suits of the volunteer

workers, soaking the piles o
retrieved from the flood.

sides of the cattle that hud
trucks. It whips at the

{ household goods they have
It rolls down the steaming
dle unhappily on the rescue
face of the stout woman

with the blue kerchief over her bedraggled hair who

stands watching the cat haul
the trucks through the water.

“Oh God,” she says to the man
beside her. “What’ll it be like
when we get back?”

He takes her arm. “Well, it’s
something that we were able to
get the cattle out,” he consoles
her. }

But not all the people are
ready, even now that the dykes
‘are crumbling, to abandon their

homes to the river. Not all of
them can console themselves
with the thought that it might
have been worse, Some of them
are bitter at what they consider

the - ’s complacency,
lis tarainess in taking measures
to fight the flood and its in-
efficiency even in the measures
it has taken.

Behind the flooded Dewdney
Garage, where the water is al-
window of a rambling frame
house. His face is expressionless
as he watenes a youth pole a
raft past his verandah and over
to a neighpor’s lilac bush, its
mauve biooms standing incon-
gruously out of the dark water
where a launch is tied fast. The
man is clad only in a suit of long
underwear and by his attitude
he is determined to sit the flood
out.

There are others like him, men
and women to whom this flood
is the culminating tragedy in a
long struggle to keep themselves
above the poverty level of the
aepression years. Their land is
ruined now—it will be years be-
fore fit can be restored and
- cattle eat silt grass—but they

are loath to leave their flooded

homes.

One man explains it to us this
way. “So long as I can hang on.
maybe I can do something, see.
Once I go away, God knows if
Ill have anything to come back

* to.”

His neighbor who is helping
him to move his furniture to the
upper floor nods. <

“A whole lot of this could have
been avoided by, a, little foresight,
a whole lot of it. The dyking
- system wasn't so good, anyway,
but the government didn’t have

to wait until the water was away,

up before they did anything
about it,’ he declares, ;

“T wish that there ‘Boss’ John-
son had come around here. He‘d
have heard plenty.”

You hear this bitterness, this
feeling that the government
could have averted much of the
disaster had it recognized the
danger earlier, wherever you go
in the Fraser Valley, You hear it
from the peuple themslves, from’
the volunteers who have been
working night and day trying
to compensate by their own ef-
forts for the government’s lack
of coordination and direction.

“We'll have to force a lot of
people to evacuate.’ the man
who is in charge of rescue opera-
tions at Dewdney Crossing,
states. “We need boats in the
worst way.” But there are no
boats here now.

“We need men to work on the
dykes,” they tell us at

But in Queensborough, where _

we volunteer our services, there
is no one who can tell us where
to go. And on the road back to
Vancouver we pick uP two
weary mud-splashed youths who
have been working all day on the
dykes at Lulu Island and they
complain, “They get you out
there, all right, but they leave
you to find your own way back.”

The people recognized the
emergency and they responded
whole-heartedly. The govern-
ment was the last to recognize
the danger and to accept its re-
sponsibility. Even then, it lulled
the people with false assurances.

When finally it declared a state.

of emergency it was only giving
tardy recognition to an existing
situation and it proved itself in-
capable of mobilizing effectively
all the generous self-sacrificing
efforts of the people themselves.

This is not, only my indictment.
It is on the lips of the great
majority of the people in the
Fraser Valley, those who aré
the victims of the greatest flood
disaster in half a century and
those who live at its edges.

A woman at Port Mann ex-
pressed to me the concern that
is uppermost in the minds of
thousands of Fraser Valley Yresi-
dents.

“We've paid dyking taxes for

years,” she said, “but the dyke
was not cleaned out and kept
in repair. We raised the matter
in the Bridgeview Community
Association and got nowhere, It

the Was obvious that sooner or later

when it might have done some a proper
| good and now the water’s all next yea
- over our land they’re running Wo

around like a bunch of chickens
with their heads cut off.”

He spat disgustedly into the
water.

.

the river would flood. Now it

at’s the government going
‘ compensate us?
iz to do to build

g¢ system so that
f he year after it

what we want to know.”
It is one. on the Coalition
governn won't .be able to

evade.

has flooded and we're the vic- |

-

Flood rolls into Mission

When this picture was taken on Friday last week the water was already too deep for low-slung
later model cars, but trucks, jeeps and. jalopies, many of them driven by IWA members engaged in
relief work. were still getting through the flood waters covering the road between Mission and the
bridge to Matsqui, now also inundated. Only a few hours later deepening waters made the highway
well-nigh impassable and Mission bridge_was closed. Trying to get through a similar flooded stretch
of road at Port Mann a Pacific Tribune writer’s car stalled in the water. :

Morgan calls on governments
to guarantee rehabilitation _

“Announcement of government plans to underwrite flood damages, now estimated to
exceed thirty million dollars, is already long overdue,” declared Nigel Morgan, LPP provin-
cial leader, in a statement on the flood situation issued Wednesday.

Many of those living in the Valley have risked their lives in efforts to stay with their

This tim

—

reporters have discovered. because Pee maracas xe aye

of their frantic concern for their @ ; - b d :

possessions, particularly since re- ft

ports of looting have spread around. : e I mus € one
This is what provincial Premier Davie wrote to federal

Prime Minister Sir John Thompson following the disastrous

flood of 1894:

“The most serious and important aspect of the case
affects the future. Bridges have been washed away. roads
and trails obliterated, dyke walls broken down . . . What

is plainly the lesson of the flood is the necessity of a com-—
prehensive system of dyking which will include the whole
inundated area of the Fraser. The magnitude of the task
places it beyond the ability of private enterprise and
makes it clearly the duty of the state to undertake .. .
The undertaking has a most important bearing upon the
interests of this province for all time to come.” . 3
This was the lesson of 1894- But the necessary work
was never done. It is equally the lesson of 1948. This time
the work must be done and a comprehensive Fraser Valley

flood control system constructed. ‘

‘
A federal-provincial guarantee of
|| 100 percent restitution as proposed
by Morgan would relieve their
minds now in the midst of their
hardship.

Morgan charged that “govern-
ment bungling and failure to accept

responsibility for adequate flood
controls, or even take emergency
protective measures in spite of the|.-
weeks of warning that dyking
authorities had, is directly respon-
sible for the great national disaster
that: has hit B.C., causing loss of
life’s earnings and means of secur-
ity for thousands of our citizens,”
he said. :

“With thousands of acres of val-
uable farmland inundated, the
year’s crops completely destroyed,
about one quarter of the 87,000 cat-
tle in the Fraser Valley either dead

.

CPPEQULLEREUEETUACUULERA

MIT] TH A EU TT
iMAC i it i i

to 10 cents cash, with abolition of
the $1 weekly pass and boost ‘in

plans for adequate reimburse-
ment of those suffering flood

e ge a Mo 2 ote cnt of! losses.” price of tickets from four for 25
omes wrec. an wa er-damag-
ed, joint action raust be taken by| “The Labor-Progressive Party |Cents ‘0 four for Was on

Ald. H. M. Diggon, chairman of
the civic transportation committee,
has announced he expected the re-
quest for elimination of the weekly
pass because it was the understand-
ing at the time the present fare
structure was approved that they
would be done away with “if costs —
went too high.” | a,

demands the government accept its
responsibility and act now to al-
leviate the great hardships and fin-
ancial ruination that will follow re-
cession of the flood waters,” he
concluded.

LPP opposes
fare boost —

VICTORIA, B.C.—With their new
20-year franchise a bare six months
. ia at old, B.C, Electric and Vancouver

rities mus compelled to rec- |Island Coach Lines are moving to
ognize the urgent necessity of | increase fares in the four Greater|tee, which is hotly contesting the
immediately announcing specific Victoria municipalities from 7 cents | boost. '

' PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JUNE 4, 1948—PAGE 2

provincial and federal authorities
to take care of the heavy losscs
not covered by insurance,” Morgan
stated.

“Some emergency action has fin-
ally been undertaken, but not un-
til one of the worst disasters in
B.C.’s history was upon us and vig-
orous demands of the labor-farmer
movement and strong public opin-
ion compelled .action.” :

“That undoubtedly was Diggon’s
understanding but it wasn’t the un-
derstanding of th2 citizens who
voted for the franchise a year ago
on the basis of retention of the $1
pass. An earlier plebiscite saw de-
feat by an overwhelming. majority
of a franchise offer that dropped
the pass,” stated Mrs. Doris Blakey,
secretary of Victoria LPP Commit-

Strongly comm the
thousands of peckia wens. have
rallied to the aid of. the unfor-
tunate flood victims in emergen-"
cy protective and relief measures,
Morgan said, “Government auth-