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-