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Flooding across the Northwest Bellingham, Seattle, and the Olympic coast all had their rainiest autumns on record in 2021. The flooding that followed cut off towns and Indian reservations from the outside world. The losses were most severe just to the north, in British Columbia, where the 500-year floods killed 4 people and more than 600,000 farm animals, and did an estimated $7 billion in damages. For Whatcom County, the flooding was the costliest disaster in the county’s history. Gov. Inslee and the state’s Congressional delegation are seeking federal disaster aid for Whatcom, Skagit, and Clallam counties and for the Lummi, Nooksack, and Quileute tribes. Activist Rosalinda Guillen with Community to Community in Bellingham said floodwaters displaced large numbers of farmworkers and their families, who lived in mobile homes and substandard housing. About 800 homes in Whatcom County were hit by floodwaters. As of mid-December, about 200 evacuees were still sheltering in motels and other temporary housing. “Why are there mobile homes and housing placed in floodplain areas where the flooding happens all the time?” Guillen asked. “We've seen these floods here before. They've never been this bad, but it's always flooded.” “This year and last year has been very difficult for farmworkers in rural areas,” Guillen said. “You've got Covid that we have to deal with, then the heat dome, and now we have the flooding.” Guillen’s group is calling on Whatcom County to provide better emergency housing than a labor camp in Sumas built for individual migrant workers, where about 30 evacuees have been staying. County officials say each family at the Sarbanand Farms facility in Sumas has its own bunkhouse. “We’re just trying to put folks in a warm place to stay until they can move out and move on,” Whatcom County spokesperson Jed Holmes said. “Skagit and Whatcom counties have extremely low rental vacancy rates, which will make finding an affordable and available home in the area enormously challenging for the hundreds of individuals displaced by this disaster,” Inslee said in his aid request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Northern Washington and much of British Columbia had to endure a gauntlet of climate-fueled disasters this year, one after the other: heat, wildfires and their smoke, and flooding rivers — all in the midst of a global pandemic. Meade Krosby said that’s the thing about climate change: It doesn’t wait around until nothing else is going on. Tackling it will require learning how to solve multiple problems at the same time.
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