Trapped by flooding, Stratford man grateful for BC town’s kindness

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What was intended as a drive from Calgary to Salt Spring Island, BC, to repair a deck for his boss left a Stratford man stranded for more than five days in the midst of some of the worst flooding that province has seen in decades.

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Stratford’s Errol Fischer, an event producer and general handyman for Stratford singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt, said he embarked on what was intended to be a roughly 15-hour trip from his parents’ home in Calgary to the island off the coast of Vancouver early Nov . 14 to finish a deck-repair job.

“I had been out there for most of September and October, and it had been raining pretty steady out on Salt Spring,” Fischer said. “So I came back because we help out with Remembrance Day (in Stratford), and then I went back out just to finish the last bits and get it inspected and be done with it.

On his drive into BC, winding through Banff, down to Radium Hot Springs to avoid construction closures on the Trans-Canada Highway and back up toward Rogers Pass, it was already raining heavily. While he knew a storm was on the horizon, Fischer said he thought he could make it to McKennitt’s house on Salt Spring and back before things got ugly.

By the time he pulled into Revelstoke to fill up on gas, Fischer said the Columbia River town was already flooded with a two feet of water. After leaving Kamloops, Fischer “headed up the Coquihalla (Highway),” where there were already heavy rain warnings.

“When I came into Merritt, they had shut down the highway behind me,” Fischer said.

After another detour, Fischer finally pulled onto Highway 3, the major artery that cuts across the southern part of the province. While traffic was moving slowly and there was some significant pooling on the highway, Fischer said he arrived in Hope by 10 pm, just as the last of the four major highways that lead in and out of the town was closed by police.

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With no hotel rooms available in Hope, Fischer joined the cavalcade of vehicles parked in every available spot. While the town had opened up a local school as a temporary shelter for travelers, Fischer opted to spend the first few nights in his truck since he had water, food, a blanket and clean clothes.

As power had been cut off by the nearby landslides, Fischer said almost every store in town had to close, save for one gas station that had a backup generator. Since the population of Hope had swelled from its usual 6,000 residents to roughly 10,000, Fischer said there were hundreds of people waiting in the rain for more than 90 minutes to buy supplies.

Fischer said the town quickly came together to offer help to those stranded – from restaurants cooking hot meals on gas burners to families opening up their homes to travelers.

By Wednesday, Fischer said power was restored and local stores began opening again, so he gratefully accepted an offer of a hot shower and a couch to sleep on from a local family.

Also looking to help, Fischer began driving families to the Hope Regional Airport, where private, chartered helicopters had started flying in supplies from Abbotsford and taking families out of town to the relative safety of the Abbotsford International Airport.

As the rain had slowed by that time, Fischer said travelers were also chartering jet boats from up the Fraser River in Boston Bar to come down the river and take them out of town to safety.

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Nearing the end of the week, Fischer said police and road crews started briefly opening the highways for a few hours at a time to clear the backlog of travelers in Hope.

After seeing a Facebook post about Highway 3 possibly being reopened for a short time on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 19, Fischer and his truck were third in line when police and road workers reopened that road. But with towns having been evacuated from Hope almost to Kamloops, Fischer knew he needed enough gas, food and water to drive as much as six or seven hours before reaching safety.

“It was pretty eerie. It’s was like driving down Highway 8 to Kitchener, but you were the only car. There’s nobody coming; there’s nobody going. By the time everybody got on the road and the cars spaced out, it was just you, ”Fischer said. “The road had some rough patches and you could see where (highway crews) had scraped the hillside off the road. There were spots where they had roped off the side of the roads, and we were down to a couple of lanes because it was all washed out. You could see where the asphalt was gone and the river’s right there. ”

Because the highway was on relatively high ground, Fischer had a full view of how bad the flooding had been when driving by Princeton, one of the hardest hit towns in the interior.

“The entire town was underwater. … As I was driving by there… you could see people shovelling their house out onto the street. Having gone through that in Calgary in 2013 – I ran a construction company that helped with the flood cleanup –you’re literally picking up people’s life possessions with a Bobcat and putting it into the dumpster, ”he said.

Despite the trials endured by these BC residents, Fischer said he was amazed at how the Hope community pulled together to help complete strangers.

“People look after people in emergencies, and it’s all about community,” Fischer said. “That community was the reason that I got through this as well as I did and the reason a lot of other people got through this. Hope, very much like Stratford, is a smaller town. People opened their doors. Those people who took us in didn’t know us from anybody. We didn’t know them from anybody. ”

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