'It's my life's work': B.C. fruit and vegetable growers face uncertainty after floods
CTV
While their homes and farm fields remain inundated by water, Curtis Sandhu says his family is looking towards rebuilding after a dike failed and devastating flooding hit the prime agricultural area east of Vancouver nearly two weeks ago.
While their homes and farm fields remain inundated by water, Curtis Sandhu says his family is looking towards rebuilding after a dike failed and devastating flooding hit the prime agricultural area east of Vancouver nearly two weeks ago.
The flooding in the Sumas Prairie came little more than four months after a heat wave in late June “torched” their entire raspberry crop and roughly a quarter of their overall fruit and vegetable crops, Sandhu said in an interview.
Sandhu's family came to Canada in the early 1960s and began farming about a decade later. Today, the 27-year-old and his parents grow a variety of berries and vegetables across about 120 hectares, while several other relatives have farms nearby in the Abbotsford area.
“You spend 45 years building something and then to see it all go in six hours or something, it's hard to see, right?” Sandhu said. “But, you know, being an immigrant family and working for everything they had, (my dad) said, well, we're not going to go anywhere, we can't go anywhere, this is our home and we're not going to stop.”
Sandhu and his family left home last Tuesday following an evacuation order and the next day they received photos showing their almost two-metre berry plants underwater.
They wondered if their home, built on higher ground, would be all right, he said. A visit by boat last Saturday revealed more than a metre of water inside.
It was hard to see their belongings and pictures floating around when he waded in, but the visit also brought some acceptance and a resolve to move forward, Sandhu said.
