Sunday, 20 May 2018

The Mighty Fraser River

We took a drive this morning to the little village of Matqui which is close to the Fraser River. Only the dike protects the village and all the farms and homes from the river which is rising now as it does every Spring causing anxiety to all who would be affected should the dike not hold.
As you can see the water has already risen a lot. There's still a lot of snow to melt up-country and flow into the river as well as to the north there's been heavy rain.
I took these photos from on the dike.








On May 31, 1948 a fifty foot section of the dike gave out and the result was a massive flood.
It was the 20th century's largest Fraser Valley flood.  The picture below was Matqui's main street.





The dike  has been improved since that devastating time 70 years ago but still there's always the possibility that something could go wrong. One can only hope for the best.


Thanks for visiting, 

           Granny Marigold


7 comments:

  1. Yes, we have been seeing this on the news....amazing what force and power that water has when it's rising or flowing! Hope all will be okay for those worried residents. Here we finally got rain before the weekend; it was getting very worrisome as it was so dry and always very windy. We actually had reduced visibility on some days due to the dust storms. Everything will green up well now. Enjoy your long weekend.
    Ellabie

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  2. Hope the dike holds and the water goes down soon. Those are some great old photos!:)

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  3. I can understand why the people who live in this village are concerned. The pictures you took already show the seriousness of the situation, but if the snow melt is yet to come...well...we'll just pray that the dike holds up.

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  4. Make me glad I live on high ground.
    Floods are devastating, water does so much damage.

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  5. The Fraser is pretty impressive at the moment isn't it?. The park has flooded like that many times before. We used to live on Matsqui Pairie near Clayburn village. I don't know if our house was there during the big flood, but the neighbour down the road told us once how high the water was on their old house. We got a few of our own mini floods when the water in the ditches would overflow and the land would flood in our area. The toilet wouldn't flush, there was water under the house, and we would have to wear rubber boots to get from the house to the car.

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  6. Lots of snowmelt and rain! Still beautiful though. Let's all hope the dyke system holds, and the land can absorb the moisture slowly.

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  7. Hope all is well for those folks!

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