Emergency Response to Atmospheric River

An atmospheric river made landfall in southwestern British Columbia in November 2021 and triggered flooding, bank erosion, and debris flows. The event effectively cut off Vancouver and other communities from the BC mainland for several weeks. BGC leveraged its relationships with pipeline, railways, transportation owners, communities, and First Nations, to facilitate a coordinated emergency response and collect high resolution lidar and orthophotos in the days and weeks after the event. The emergency response considered the hazards’ impact to different pieces of infrastructure along shared corridors. Response efforts included rapid field and aerial assessment of impacted sites, lidar analysis and lidar change detection, weather analysis, and mitigation support to rapidly return assets to service.