A businesswoman who suffered damages in B.C.’s Sumas Flood last November is hopeful a Vancouver-area lawyer can win a class action lawsuit against the City of Abbotsford and the Province of British Columbia..Lawyer Anthony Vecchio filed a class action suit in the B.C. Supreme Court against the Province of British Columbia, the Fraser Valley Regional District (FVRD) the City of Abbotsford, and three unnamed companies involved in monitoring for potential emergencies. .The lawsuit alleges the defendants “failed to warn…of the impending and foreseeable Sumas Flood in a timely manner and also failed to implement emergency measures and warnings when they knew or ought to have known that a flood impacting the Sumas Prairie was the foreseeable consequence of the weather preceding the Sumas Flood.”.The plaintiffs are seeking general, special and punitive damages, and relief for the legal costs of the lawsuit. If successful, all who suffered losses in the flood could be eligible for compensation..Co-plaintiff Caroline Mostertman co-owns C.P.M. Farms, Ripples Winery, New Wave Distilling, and Woodbridge Ponds (a plant and fish nursery). She saved half of her spirits and wine inventory, but says with two days’ warning, she could have done far better..“Farmers are pretty resilient and self-sufficient… We could have moved mountains in two days. Had we chosen not to, that would have been that our decision, but we were not given that opportunity,” she told the Western Standard in an interview..“We could have moved our entire spirits and wine inventory off the farm. It would have been as easy as just loading it up onto a flatbed trailer because they’re all on pallets, and trucking it up the hill 10 minutes to our neighbor. I mean, he had barns and barns and barns that we could have stuffed it all in.”.According to the lawsuit, residents of Washington State were given flood warnings days before those in B.C. received them. And as flooding began, the City of Abbotsford chose not to use the emergency system and instead made phone calls to the first households to be evacuated..“Those 300 people know there’s an emergency just by looking out their window, so we didn’t want to alarm the whole city,” Mayor Henry Braun said at a press conference..An engineering report commissioned by the province in 2015 found the Sumas Dikes that protect the farms in the flood plain were two feet too low, yet upgrades did not take place..In an interview with the Western Standard, Vecchio said he believes the city and province were grossly negligent. .“There was only two breaches. Those were not only able to be dyked up, they knew being Abbotsford, and they knew being the provincial government, that this was critical areas that could breach and they breached,” Vecchio said..“They knew that they should warn, they didn’t. And they didn’t take any emergency preparedness until it was too late.” .Vecchio, a Vancouver-area lawyer who specializes in class action lawsuits, says the maximum $240,000 emergency payment won’t go nearly far enough for agricultural businesses there. He says the government has an even greater responsibility to those in the area because of their vulnerability..“This is an uninsurable area. None of them have insurance. Why? Because insurance companies will not provide insurance in a floodplain. And so that makes it that much more important that the government needs to be very vigilant to ensure that they weren’t affected. It increases their standard of care,” Vecchio said. .“Most of the people have immense property damage. They’ve got millions and millions of losses, in terms of infrastructure, their tractors, their machinery, etc.”.Fellow plaintiff dairy farmer Ted Dykman listed five vehicles, many electric pumps, motors, hay and grain among his flood losses. Overall, livestock losses from the flood exceeded 600,000 poultry, 12,000 hogs, 420 dairy cattle and 120 beehives..Mostertman said she’s uninsured and, like many local agricultural businesses, can’t qualify for emergency assistance because she grossed more than a million dollars in sales last year. .“We’re going to be starting back from square one. I have no idea yet what the grapes and the blueberries will produce if they survived. We’ll have to start building up inventory. We lost a lot of paperwork in the flood as well,” Mosterman said..“The machinery and equipment, a few bits and pieces that we’ve been able to salvage and get running again, their life expectancy has been shortened by two weeks underwater. The lands, the berries, the grapes, the condition that is in, we can’t even begin to put a dollar figure all of that.”.Mostertman has spent 40 years farming, though the distillery only began in 2015..“All the different products that we had in tanks we lost. So yeah, it’s not just going to be turning around cleaning the barn and I’m putting chickens back in. It’s going to be years of rebuilding.”.Lee Harding is a freelance contributor to the Western Standardbased in Saskatchewan
