Reports in Canadian media suggesting Whatcom County was going to “send” Nooksack River floodwaters into that country prompted Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu to issue a rare clarifying statement Monday. The misleading coverage in the Canadian press came as people on both sides of the border were still recovering from the major floods of November 2021.
Sidhu’s statement, which appeared on Facebook and in the Cascadia Daily News, emphasized the county had no plans to “send” water into Canada. Rather, Sidhu said, nature does that already.
“The Nooksack River naturally overflows its banks during high flow events near the Whatcom County town of Everson, and this water flows downhill through an old river valley north into the town of Sumas and across the border into Canada,” the county executive said in his statement.
Media north of the border started raising an alarm after a Jan. 13 meeting of the county’s Flood Control Zone District Advisory Committee. County River and Flood Division Manager Paula Harris briefed committee members on a proposal to buy out homeowners throughout the Nooksack River floodplain, including the overflow stretch between Everson and Sumas.
Immediately after hearing the report, committee members worried that a buyout program would appear to Canadians as an effort to clear the way for flooding to continue north, to that country’s valuable agricultural land outside Abbotsford.
While the latest flood damage estimates for Whatcom County are around $100 million, the damage dealt to farmland to the north — the most productive agricultural region in Canada — is closer to $1 billion.
“We have to consider the impacts of sending that much water through Everson, Nooksack and Sumas and then into Abbotsford,” Everson Mayor John Perry said at the Flood Control Zone District meeting. The Canadian press latched onto Perry’s use of the word “sending.”
The Vancouver Sun published a story on Jan. 26 with the headline, “U.S. officials consider plan that would ‘send’ Nooksack River overflow into Canada.” The story was initially reported by the Fraser Valley Current, which has since corrected its headline so it no longer implied that Whatcom County was talking about creating a path for floodwater into Canada.
But the public relations damage had already been done. “Whatcom County does not and has no plans to ‘send’ Nooksack floodwaters north to Canada,” Sidhu said in his statement.
Sidhu went on to explain that, for now, the county is using a flood plan from 1999 that recommends keeping the natural overflow channel between Everson and Sumas.
Perry said it was time to revisit that old idea.
“One of the biggest conversations that we need to have is, is this the appropriate location for that much of the Nooksack overflow?” he said.
Sumas Mayor Bruce Bosch, who took office at the start of the year, said in an interview that future flood planning should include ways to reduce the amount of water that escapes the Nooksack and heads to Sumas. The November floods damaged 80% of the homes in Sumas, Bosch said.
Sumas’ mayor sympathized with Canadians’ concerns about where Whatcom’s flood control stands now.
“Maybe we’re not ‘sending’ the water to them, but we’re not taking action to stop it,” Bosch said. “Lynden and Ferndale should expect the same amount of water, so it’s evenly distributed in the river’s natural floodplain,” he added. “Sumas is a part of that, but so is everyone else.”
Officials may be bringing a renewed sense of urgency to solving the Nooksack River flooding problem, but any comprehensive solution is still decades away.
This year, the county is asking the state Legislature for $7.75 million that would go toward flood-protection studies and the home buyout program. Over the next 20 years, however, the county anticipates the total cost of flood protection on the Nooksack to be $270 million.
This leaves plenty of time for everyone, including Canadian officials, to get a seat the table and help guide county flood-control efforts.
The mayor of Abbotsford is already involved, having participated in a Jan. 17 meeting about the Nooksack flood problem with local, state and federal officials from both sides of the international border.
“I’m here to learn and to figure out how can we together join arms across the border and solve a problem in Canada and a problem in Whatcom County,” Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun said at the Jan. 17 meeting.
