Vancouver’s climate disaster that you may have missed

00:05

Davion Ford

Welcome to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, where we talk to change-makers who are working to make our cities better places for people to live, work and play. I'm your host, Davion Ford. In this episode, we’re heading to Vancouver to talk with Bryan Crosby, Director of Infrastructure Resilience for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure in British Columbia, Canada. We discuss some of the unprecedented climate events and challenges that have befallen the province, emphasizing the need for a multidimensional approach to achieving climate resilience. In partnership with Infrastructure Canada, the Ministry has engaged Arcadis to research and develop guidance on how to best apply systems-based thinking to enhance climate resilience in British Columbia, which is at the forefront of the ongoing climate emergency.

01:04

Davion Ford

Situated on Canada's west coast, Vancouver is a city whose past is deeply rooted in its Indigenous heritage, with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations as original inhabitants. The European exploration of what is now Vancouver, British Columbia, began in the mid-19th century with Captain George Vancouver. A significant population surge followed during the Fraser Gold Rush of the 1860s, paving the way for the city's development and incorporation in 1886. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1887 further fueled Vancouver's growth. This connection to eastern provinces opened new trade opportunities and significantly shaped the history and economy of the city.

Today, Vancouver has a vibrant economy with thriving sectors such as technology, film production, tourism, and resource industries. In particular, the technology sector is a significant economic driver. Thanks to the city's tech ecosystem, Vancouver has become a haven for startups and tech giants, fostering growth in software development, gaming, and digital media. Vancouver is also an international trade hub, in particular for resources such as lumber, minerals, and seafood. The city’s film and television industry, referred to as "Hollywood North," also significantly contributes to the economy, with Vancouver’s scenic locations and skilled workforce attracting major film and television productions, which drive job creation, tourism, and infrastructure development.

But it’s not all good news for the City of Vancouver, its residents and people living throughout British Columbia. This part of Canada is part of a large swath of North America that is on the frontlines of the climate crisis. This can be seen in the form of severe storms, scorching heatwaves, and drought. These extreme weather conditions lead to flash flooding, landslides, power outages and wildfires, all of which threaten and disrupt the lives of people across British Columbia.

Back in 2021, British Columbia was really pummeled by climate change the entire year, and this culminated in a so-called atmospheric river event in November. Atmospheric rivers are a weather phenomenon, which is also known as tropical plumes, cloud bands or water vapor surges. An atmospheric river is a narrow band of enhanced water vapor which can drop a tremendous amount of precipitation in a very short period of time. Climate change increases the likelihood of these forming and in November of 2021, an historic surge of this type made landfall in British Columbia and dumped nearly an entire month’s worth of rain on the province in a mere 48 hours. This led to catastrophic damage across British Columbia from flooding and landslides and as a result, closed nearly every road or highway going in and out of the City of Vancouver. In the aftermath, this has led to concerted efforts to enhance the resilience of transportation infrastructure in and around the city and across British Columbia. To this end, Arcadis has partnered with local authorities to produce a guidebook on climate risk and climate adaptation planning. For more on this, here’s Arcadis’ Aysia Stante.

04:27

Aysia Stante

Infrastructure doesn't exist in isolation. Managing climate risks requires understanding how our infrastructure systems depend on other systems, and also understanding the services that these infrastructure systems provide to society, the environment and the economy. Arcadis is honored to have partnered with the B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure and Infrastructure Canada on developing a guidebook to teach practitioners how to apply systems thinking when conducting climate risk assessments and climate adaptation planning. The principle behind this guidebook is to map the interconnectedness between the physical, social, and economic systems that affect us every day, but that we often don't take time to examine. The power of this is that it can help us understand how these infrastructure systems behave in a more holistic way. And it allows us to plan for resiliency in a manner that accounts for this interconnectedness. The advantage of this is that we can then better understand the inner workings of these complex systems, uncover hidden variables that may affect the resiliency of the system, and then plan for adaptation in a way that we can also prevent unintended consequences.

05:39

Davion Ford

That was Arcadis’ Climate Adaptation Specialist, Aysia Stante. Now to learn more about all of this it's my pleasure to welcome our guest, Bryan Crosby. Bryan is the Director of Infrastructure Resilience for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure in British Columbia, and he is well-versed in the challenges posed by climate change and the strategies being implemented to achieve greater climate resilience across British Columbia.

06:13

Davion Ford

Hello Bryan, welcome to Better Cities by Design

06:17

Bryan Crosby

Hi Davion, thanks for having me.

06:18

Davion Ford

So I have to say before one of my colleagues brought this story to my attention, I had not heard about this atmospheric river in British Columbia back in 2021. In fact, to be honest, I don't even know what an atmospheric river is. I'd never really heard of that. So what was it like there in British Columbia with all of this took place? And specifically, how did it impact the transportation network?

06:41

Bryan Crosby

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure if rivers are sometimes referred to as pineapple Express's. So it's a it's a large movement of moisture from the ocean over to land and it usually brings off heavy amounts of precipitation. So British Columbia is traditionally no stranger to climate-driven events, floods, wildfires, landslides, avalanches, long history of living with and responding to such occurrences. And I had been personally involved in many floods responses during my time in government. But a lot of these have just largely been regional impacts, right? And I think what really occurred in November 2021 was unprecedented for our province. It was the first time that we had impacts of climate-driven events that really concentrated in Vancouver, lower mainland, and that's 60% of the population of the province lives. Vancouver is the focal point of Canada's Pacific Gateway, one in $3 of trade moves to the Port of Vancouver. So just having the impacts where they were, was very different than anything that anyone had ever experienced before. And just to create some more context too, right, like during this event, every highway to the Lower Mainland from the rest of Canada was closed. For one week, there was no way to really get out or to get in. And we managed to get secondary routes open within a week. But these are just small, two-lane highways, right, and then really weren't people to handle the sort of traffic you would normally see coming out of a major metropolitan area. You know, we had our railways closed, both major national railways were closed, and that cut off access to the Port of Vancouver as well as goods moving in and out. Our pipeline, we have a Trans-Mountain Pipeline that delivers petroleum products from Alberta. This was shut down for 21 days, the longest shutdown in the history of the pipeline, right? This impacted the ability of energy products to get from Alberta to British Columbia. And this resulted in fuel rationing in the Lower Mainland for 25 days, right? So very massive impacts to life for residents of British Columbia.

08:40

Davion Ford

This is just a disaster that you're describing, like a full-blown mega disaster as a result of a climate event.

08:48

Bryan Crosby

Yeah, yeah, it really was. And it was, like I was saying, we have an experience with regional disasters, it's not new to us, but for something on a scale, affecting so many people, and really was a very trying time for the province. I had actually deployed South a few days after it happened to assist them when the operation centers and it was just absolutely constant. They just one thing after the other, right just didn't stop raining. You know, the highway closures didn't stop, you got one highway open and another one closed. And it just went on and on and on. It took us 35 days to reopen the Coquihalla, which is one of the major routes from the interior of the province to the Lower Mainland. So it was very significant event.

09:30

Davion Ford

So to add to this whole situation happening, everyone has to also keep in mind the year 2021. Right? And the fact that we were still dealing with COVID during that period, it's a time that I think a lot of listeners and or if they're like me, I've kind of tried to wipe out of my mind, but this definitely is at a time that that was compounded by the fact that the pandemic was still raging.

09:56

Bryan Crosby

Yeah, the pandemic and let me step back just a little bit to even paint you a more depressing picture of British Columbia in 2021. So it was an extremely difficult year for the province, and it started off very early. We had pretty extreme flooding in April, May and June. And this flooding cut off a small Indigenous community for three months that didn't have access, road access to the community. And this is a very significant impact for communities like this. So right off the bat, we were experiencing flooding throughout the province. And then we, in June 2021, we had the infamous North American heat dome, which impacted the province and, and there was a community in British Columbia called Lytton, and it broke national heat records for three straight days. 49.6 degrees Celsius on June 29. This is the highest recorded temperature in Canada and the third hottest record in North America. So this heat dome, it killed over 600 people during this time throughout the province. And just when we thought we're getting over the heat dome, one day later, after that record was hit, a wildfire started near Lytton, and within hours, it destroyed the entire town and killed two people, right? So, and this started off the third worst wildfire season on record in the province, 8700 kilometers were burned. So that's about the size of Puerto Rico, for some context. That's about, to almost 1800 different fires occurring at any given time. So huge impact and then just after wildfire season, we move into one of the rainiest records on the season, this is where the atmospheric river happened. So over two days, we had hundreds of millimeters of rainfall in the Lower Mainland. And so just as we're moving out of wildfire season, we get hit by the atmospheric river. And then on top of all of this, we're living in a pandemic, like you said, right? So in all the nonsense and associated fuzziness that comes with that. And in particular, the pandemic really affected our accessibility with the United States or land crossings or under travel restrictions. So that really reduced the ability of the network redundancy, to help us with what I mentioned earlier, all our homes were cut off, we didn't have efficient access to the United States. Very complicated.

12:17

Davion Ford

That's intense.

12:17

Bryan Crosby

Yeah.

12:17

Davion Ford

Kudos to you and to everybody who worked through that very, very difficult period to continue to, you know, be focused on providing these essential services that folks take for granted, just being able to use the roads to get from point A to point B, during a what was really a hellish period. So focusing again on the atmospheric river and that aspect of this disaster, but totally take on board that this was just rolling disaster after rolling disaster throughout that entire year. How did that event inform the work that you do? And what you and your team are doing to make a difference there now?

12:52

Bryan Crosby

Yeah, I think that's another great question. And I think one of the things we really learned from that year was ideas of interdependencies and compounding factors that exist in the systems we live within, right? And this is, I think, the first time some of these concepts really entered into the public realm in our province, so not just with leadership, but also through the media and just general casual conversations among people that live here. And I think these perspectives of interdependency, they've always been there and were hidden in pockets of academia and scientists and little tiny, obscure bureaucratic government offices, but this was atmospheric river and that the 2021 agenda was really the first time I started seeing these things become a little more sturdy, right. So I think, collectively, we start seeing that compounding climate events at work in a very destructive action. That was a real lesson for me, the fragility of supply chains, but also, you know, aspects of resiliency that are present in our systems as well, and you only have the ability, the private sector to redistribute, reroute and work with government to ensure that goods kept flowing, even if it was small amounts of goods on the key routes we managed to keep open. No, it was quite astonishing, in some ways. I mean, it wasn't ideal, but I think it could have been a lot worse. And it was really nice to see or good to see the ability society to sort of rebound and adjust to all these things that have happened and talk to them. For our own work here at MOTI. I think it opened a window for us to really dig into those concepts of systems thinking, right? And the philosophy behind that and how to use systems to better understand our infrastructure, right? You know, there are other ways to realize resilience, right? Looking at things through systems.

14:45

Davion Ford

This is exactly where I wanted to go with this conversation in particular around resilience. This is a really important topic for us here at Arcadis and a big chunk of work that we look at. And so I'm very curious. We know that climate change is really an accelerant, right for all types of, let's say resilience incidents that can be happening in communities and cities, and this compounding effect, right that you spoke of things being way too dry, followed by being way too wet, right? And so the erratic nature of the things that are being dealt with, and how you work on a system in such a way that it can be prepared to deal with that erratic nature of what climate change is bringing to us. And just generally, when you think about the resilience of a transportation network, how do you prepare it for things that you don't necessarily know are going to happen?

15:38

Bryan Crosby

Oh, so unexpected things? Yeah, I think that's a really good thing to talk about because there's a mentality or aphorism that I think you may have heard before, it's this idea that generals always fight the last war, right? That the armies are, consequently, they're spending all their time between conflicts training, how to fight better under the conditions of the most recently experienced.

15:59

Davion Ford

And it doesn't work for resilience planning, and for actually making a system resilient. It doesn't work if you're just preparing for the things that have happened before.

16:11

Bryan Crosby

Exactly. And I think instinctively, we want to go build huge infrastructure, right? Big bridges, elevated highways, you want to stabilize all the landslides that we experience. And this is what we really want to go out and do. And in some cases, that's the right thing to do, right? But it's not the only way to achieve resilience, right? And I think by focusing on that disaster resistance component, it also is likely to be a very expensive way of achieving resilience. And this is something we probably can't afford to do everywhere, right, particularly with all these other stresses on government resources, right? So I think like resilience is multi-dimensional, there's many ways you can achieve it. You know, maybe there's ways you can improve your detours, maybe there's ways you can create early warning systems, ensuring we have the right stockpiles and materials, temporary bridges, personnel nearby. Now, there are ways you can build your infrastructure to fail in a safe way that you can repair very quickly. Right? That it absorbs that shock, but you can bounce back really fast. So I think thinking like this can really help us try to get ahead of the next disaster, right? Rather than just focusing on ways that traditionally have done things. But I think having a great understanding of the system that you're working in, can really help lessen that uncertainty, right? You know, understanding your feedbacks, looking for opportunities to explore them, manipulate those feedbacks, you know, I think can help increase resilience, not just for your asset, but for the entire system. And it's really at the core of resilience is just about being able to handle the unexpected. Really, the only system that understands that it will probably be negatively impacted by uncertainty.

17:51

Davion Ford

I'm curious since we're talking about systems, and resilience, and one of the things that we know is that a big part of making a system of any type resilient is that you need to have good data. And you need to create feedback loops, right? So that you can be in a position to essentially be tinkering, right with the system in all types of little ways, based on the feedback that you're getting from the data that you're collecting. So I'm wondering what types of data and what the role of data is and the work that you do in trying to keep the transportation system there as resilient as possible?

18:30

Bryan Crosby

Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think you'll ever have enough data to achieve what you're looking for. But I think also data can come in different forms, too. It's, there's spatial data, there's statistical data, but there's also data coming from collaborating with other people as well, their inputs, their thoughts, their feelings, about the system and working in. I think, a key component to understanding systems to ensure that you have a very robust and a very diverse team of people providing input into creating these system maps and system loops, right? You want to is this goes to the beyond multidisciplinary approach to include people that wouldn't traditionally be involved in a project that you're working. In our case in British Columbia, it could be, you know, really bringing in sort of Indigenous perspectives, traditional ecological knowledge, their understanding of watersheds and systems over time that we may not be privy to. And I think that's an interesting form of data you can bring in that's, I would say, non-traditional, would likely provide a more fulsome understanding of a system that you're interested in manipulating, pulling levers on to increase resilience. So it's really about I think, bringing as many perspectives into that discussion as possible. And it is challenging. It's not easy, and it's not something you can do in a day. It's gonna take quite a bit of work to build a proper system out and really understand it.

19:57

Davion Ford

I really love that idea of been focused on the fact that these systems are operating on so many different levels. And the big part of what it is to get it right in terms of making the system more resilient is getting it right on all of the levels. And really, in terms of all of the cascading impacts of what happens and the things that you can do with the system, and the ways in which you can tinker with it, as I said earlier, but moving on here, I do know that the ministry has actually been doing a lot of rethinking about the approach of achieving climate resilience. And, and I know you've been involved in developing some guidance on this topic. And I was wondering if you could give a bit of an overview on that.

20:37

Bryan Crosby

Yeah, happy to. So little lucky in the Ministry of Transportation that some of our legacy staff have been thinking about climate change for some time. And before it was trending in some ways. And we do have had, or we have had policies in place since 2015, that require all of our new public transportation, infrastructure British Columbia to be built in a way that it incorporates a future climate data into that design. So this is sort of our build that better policy. So we've had this for some time, and it's been quite successful, we're getting better every day, above using climate data to inform our designs. And what my work is, or my team's work is to do is to start building upon some of those existing legacy projects, that we do have, and starting to bring ideas of climate-informed transportation planning to the equation. And that helps fill the gap of when we know how to build things that are climate-ready. But where do we build? What's the right size? What's the optimal solution here that fits with the context of the transportation network? Right? We don't have those unlimited budgets, right, we want to build what's right for the use of will. So we're looking at building criticality maps of our network to understand, you know, what pieces of the network are important for the overall health of the network, we're looking at developing risk and vulnerability methodologies that allow us to understand spatially where assets are exposed to hazards. And this will help us develop prioritization frameworks, really allow us to dig into where to make the best investments into our network to achieve that resilience. And also, I think other things we're working on, this is promoting the idea of systems thinking. We do have a guidebook that we developed with Arcadis and Infrastructure Canada, but also I think part of this is not just the guidebook, but really, in promoting the idea of systems thinking philosophy and stuff, right? We're not just talking about roads anymore here. There's a lot more connected to our roads. These aren't just bridge projects that didn't work. Maybe they're watershed projects. These are becoming very complicated. I think, using a systems lens can really, really start to clarify some of that complexity.

22:52

Davion Ford

Okay, here's my final question for you, Bryan. Looking ahead, what is your vision for the future of British Columbia, when it comes to climate resilience? And obviously, in particular, from your lens of the transportation network?

23:09

Bryan Crosby

So yeah, I think I think obviously, I would love to see a resilient British Columbia, I think that's kind of a broad state to say, but I would like a province that recognizes that climate-driven impacts are incoming, and that will, we may not be able to, like fully resist those impacts, we may be able to withstand, the impacts. And I think that has some nuance there, right? With resist implying that we're actively fighting or that we're deserting a lot of force into resources to try to stop that disruption. While withstand implies, like an organization that the province can hold itself or rebound against that disruption without necessarily deploying or using an over-proportional amount of resources, right, because as I mentioned before, we're not a large province from a population perspective, like we're the size actually of Germany and France together, like we're very large geographically, but our tax base is just about five and a half million people. Right? So we're developed relatively wealthy, but we have to deliver services throughout this massive piece of land with very limited resources. So it's really important to be making the right choices with resilience and being really efficient with those decisions. No, we can't be actively fighting, a rearguard reactionary, a war against climate change, we won't win that, but if I think we’re smart, and we make the right investments and choices, both individually as well as a government who can withstand that impact on a transportation network. I chose individually here too, because I think resilience it's not just government, it's also down to the individual. You know, making concepts of resilience a part of your daily thinking, how you have products you buy, do what you can to maintain your mental and physical health. Well, how you prepare for emergencies. These are all very important things that are at a personal level. You know, being informed and doing what we can to stay positive, right? Because I think we're going to see more of these events hitting the province, hitting the transportation network, and think it requires a whole society approach to really, really achieving that vision of a resilient British Columbia.

25:11

Davion Ford

Bryan, thank you for joining Better Cities by Design.

25:14

Bryan Crosby

Thank you very much, Davion. I really appreciate you inviting me here.

25:18

Davion Ford

That's it for this episode of the show. I want to give a big thank you to Bryan from the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure in British Columbia. Please stay tuned for future episodes as we continue to bring changemakers to the table who are driving progress in urban development. If you haven't already done so be sure to subscribe and check out our other episodes. I'm Davion Ford and you've been listening to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, the world's leading company delivering sustainable design engineering and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets. You can learn more by visiting our website arcadis.com or by following Arcadis on LinkedIn or Facebook. And please stay curious, get inspired and remember the future belongs to those who dare to make a difference in the cities we call home.