Nearly half of landslides during B.C. weather disaster linked to logging, wildfire, study finds [Video]

A study has found nearly half of the landslides, debris flows and washouts that occurred during British Columbia’s atmospheric river disaster in November 2021 originated in areas that had been logged or burned by wildfire.

Severe rains triggered a landslide that killed five people on a stretch of Highway 99 east of Pemberton, while large swaths of roads and bridges were washed away, cutting off coastal B.C. from the rest of the country.

Another 18,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes in southwestern B.C. as the series of drenching storms parked over the area for days, flooding farms and homes in the Fraser Valley.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, covered about 70,000 square kilometres in the region, examining 1,360 debris flows, landslides and bank erosion triggered by the weather event.

It found 17 per cent of those hazards originated within burned areas, 14 per …