Abbotsford flood victims want damages in class action lawsuit

A businesswoman who sustained damage in the Sumas flood in British Columbia last November hopes a Vancouver attorney can win a class action lawsuit against the city of Abbotsford and the province of British Columbia.

Attorney Anthony Vecchio filed a class action lawsuit in the BC Supreme Court against the Province of British Columbia, the Fraser Valley Regional District (FVRD), the city of Abbotsford, and three undisclosed companies involved in monitoring potential emergencies.

The lawsuit alleges that the defendants “failed to give timely warning of the impending and foreseeable Sumas flood, nor did they take immediate action and warnings when they knew or should have known that a flood affecting the Sumas prairie was foreseeable Episode of “was the weather before the Sumas flood.”

The plaintiffs are demanding general, special and criminal damages as well as reimbursement of the legal costs of the legal dispute. If successful, everyone who suffered losses from the flood could be entitled to compensation.

Co-plaintiff Caroline Mostertman is a co-owner of CPM Farms, Ripples Winery, New Wave Distilling and Woodbridge Ponds (a plant and fish nursery). She saved half of her liquor and wine inventory, but says with two days’ warning she could have done a lot better.

“Farmers are quite resilient and self-sufficient … We could have moved mountains in two days. If we had decided against it, that would have been our decision, but we were not given this opportunity, ”she told the Western Standard in an interview.

“We could have moved our entire liquor and wine inventory from the farm. It would have been so easy to just load it onto a flatbed truck since they’re all on pallets and haul it up the hill to our neighbor for 10 minutes. I mean, he had barns and barns and barns that we could have crammed everything into. “

Washington state residents received flood warnings days before British Columbia residents received them, according to the lawsuit. And when the floods started, Abbotsford City decided not to use the emergency system and instead called the first households to be evacuated.

“These 300 people know that there is an emergency when they look out the window, so we didn’t want to alert the whole city,” Mayor Henry Braun said at a press conference.

An engineering report commissioned by the province in 2015 found that the Sumas dykes that protect the farms in the flood plain were one meter too low, but no upgrades were made.

In an interview with the Western Standard, Vecchio said he believed the city and province were grossly negligent.

“There were only two violations. Not only could these be contained, they knew it was Abbotsford and they knew they were the provincial government, that these are critical areas that can be breached and they can breach, ”Vecchio said.

“They knew to warn, but they didn’t. And they didn’t take emergency preparedness until it was too late. ”

Vecchio, a Vancouver attorney who specializes in class action lawsuits, says the maximum emergency payment of $ 240,000 for agricultural businesses there won’t be nearly enough. He says the government has an even greater responsibility to the people of the region because of its vulnerability.

“This is an uninsurable area. None of them are insured. Why? Because insurance companies will not offer insurance in a floodplain. It is all the more important that the government must be very vigilant to make sure they are not affected. It increases their standard of care, ”said Vecchio.

“Most people have immense property damage. They have millions and millions of losses in terms of infrastructure, their tractors, their machines, etc. “

The co-plaintiff dairy farmer Ted Dykman counted five vehicles, many electric pumps, motors, hay and grain as his flood damage. In total, livestock losses from the flood exceeded 600,000 poultry, 12,000 pigs, 420 dairy cows and 120 beehives.

Mostertman said she was not insured and, like many local farms, could not qualify for emergency relief because she had more than $ 1 million in sales last year.

“We’ll start all over again. I still have no idea what the grapes and blueberries will produce if they survive. We need to start building inventory. We also lost a lot of paperwork to the flood, ”said Mosterman.

“The machines and devices, a few little things that we were able to save and get back to work, reduced their life expectancy by two weeks underwater. The lands, the berries, the grapes, the state in which we are, we can’t even begin to name all of that. “

Mostertman has been farming for 40 years, although the distillery didn’t start until 2015.

“We lost all the different products that we had in tanks. So yeah, it won’t just be about cleaning the coop and putting chickens back in. It will take years to rebuild. “

Lee Harding is a freelance professional for the Western Standard based in Saskatchewan

Comments are closed.