The first step in making better decisions to reduce flood risk in time for next atmospheric river that will hit the BC coast is to understand what happened this time. Here’s a start:
We made this gif on the day a State of Emergency was declared in the Province of BC. We wanted to show how the past influenced the present; how Semá:th Lake shaped the topography of the region. And, how our decisions affected how the water flows; how the dikes temporarily held water in the western prairie.
We made this gif as the floodwaters receded to show how water moved across the floodplain, and how the dikes (and dike breaches), along with the ability of the downstream gates and pumps to function given the water levels in the Fraser RIver, affected where, how deep, and how long there was water.