In the wake of a deadly landslide in the Sea-to-Sky corridor, one expert says the province needs to do more to monitor and manage landslide risk.
One person was killed when their Lions Bay home washed away during a storm on Saturday, and a second person remains unaccounted for.
Less than two months ago, a Coquitlam woman was killed in similar circumstances during an atmospheric river, while five people were killed in a mudslide on Highway 99 north of Pemberton during the destructive storms in November 2021.
Along with the human toll, the storms caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to homes, roads and other infrastructure.
John Clague, a professor emeritus in earth sciences at Simon Fraser University, said the province needs to boost efforts to survey and monitor the stability of steep slopes in landslide-prone areas where homes and roads have been built.
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“The government has spent huge amounts of money trying to better protect people on these steep slopes,” he told Global News.
“But there still are properties, I would say, maybe that were established decades ago and they didn’t have an understanding of problems of this sort that are vulnerable, and to me, it signals we do need to make a renewed large effort to try to identify where people are at risk and to do something about it.”
B.C. Transportation Minister Mike Farnworth said the province has increased its focus on monitoring roads, particularly after recent atmospheric rivers and wildfires that may have weakened slope stability.
“The province has invested money in LiDAR (sensor technology) to get a really good understanding of what slopes are like as well as flood planes,” he said.
“It’s a huge province, but it is something the province is committed to doing, has been investing money in and will continue to do.”
Clague said the province should deploy more geotechnical engineers to identify high-risk areas, and consider “triage sites” where homes or people could be at risk.
The cause of the fatal Lions Bay slide, meanwhile, remains under investigation.
In 2018, the municipality commissioned a report probing coastal, creek and hillslope hazards, but current Mayor Ken Berry said it is unclear what, if anything, the village did with the information.
“We’re living at the foot of a mountain, we’re on the shores of Howe Sound,” he said.
“There’s many outstanding risks that residents live with on a yearly basis, so I think the focus right now is just on the recovery efforts, and that’ll be looked at in more detail.”
Berry said geotechnical and structural engineers remain on site to ensure it is safe to bring heavy equipment in to continue the search efforts.
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B.C. needs to do more to monitor risky slopes after deadly landslide: expert
