THE LAND REMEMBERS
North Coast weather seems so benign, so mild. "Neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter." It's easy to be complacent. Easy to forget the storms, floods, landslides, and avalanches that devastate property and destroy lives. Who now remembers the fifty people killed at North Pacific and Inverness canneries' landslide of July 1891? Or the Oldfield slide of 1957?
Memories are fickle; incidents become exaggerated, or blurred.
But the land remembers
. Like scar tissue, alders cover the Oldfield slide behind town. I can't remember how many died, but every day I can see their memorial.Prince Rupert Regional Research Forester
Jim Schwab and associates have asked both the land and the archives how much they remember from the last century. Newspaper articles often note extreme weathers. Tree rings and soil cores can give equally reliable information once you know how to read them.Aerial photos dating from 1947 locally were reviewed. Slides noted; sites examined. Where possible these were correlated to weather records and news stories. Three watersheds on the Charlottes and Prince Rupert were surveyed.
Schwab concluded that over three-quarters of the slides (by volume) came down from
only six storms: 1875, 1891, 1917, 1935, 1957 1978.That same storm destroyed the village of Aiyansh on the Nass. Only the 1961 flood on the Nass was as devastating. Swanson Bay south of Rupert got over 88 inches of precipitation that November 1917 (a Canadian record).
So what? Schwab warns that most of the
logging done on steep slopes in the last several decades hasn't been tested by the likes of the 1917 storm. This becomes more important as resource extraction moves out of the valley bottoms and up the steeper slopes.Valleys haven't escaped completely.
Rivers flood. The Skeena spring melt in has done its damage too. More upriver than here. The old-timers say the flood of 1894 was worst. Documentation is better for 1936 and 1948.In recent times the flooding in 1978 seems to have caused the most damage. This October 29th storm brought heavy rains to melt a previous snowfall. Even Prince Rupert was worried as a 22 foot tide backed up Hays Creek to flood the highway.
And does it rain!
Anywhere from 4 to 8 inches on the worst days. 1974 had the wettest continuous stretch of rain over ten days. I see several mentions of hurricane force winds for Rupert. Plus a litany of buildings blown down or roofs taken off. A superficial summary would be to look out for late October early November as that seems to be when the record storms hit Rupert.Winter claims its victims too, especially along the transportation corridors like the highway between Terrace and Rupert. The worst was in 1974 when an avalanche took out a service station killing seven. That same storm saw Terrace get a Canadian record four foot snowfall on January 17th.
Scary stuff
. But fear is as bad as complacency. Schwab and his associates are warning us to respect nature. A simple geotechnical survey would have saved those people at the service station on Highway 16. The motel complex was built on an avalanche run-out track. And the Tsimshian word for the Inverness cannery area is said to be "place of slides".