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Canadian rains cause the city to evacuate, closing major oil pipelines Flood News

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Officials in Merrit, British Columbia, have told residents to flee as the floods have “surrounded two bridges” and forced the closure of a wastewater treatment plant.

Heavy rainstorms hit British Columbia’s western Canadian province on Monday, causing landslides, closing roads, emptying an entire town and closing an oil pipeline.

Authorities in Merritt, 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Vancouver, ordered all 7,100 citizens to flee after the rising water cut off bridges and forced the closure of a wastewater treatment plant.

“Living without a community health service carries a risk of protecting dirty water and a risk to personal health,” the council said in an official statement.

In some areas it received 200 mm (8 inches) of rain on Sunday – the number they usually see per month – and the trench continued on Monday, with roads covered in mud or 250 mm (10 inches) covered in water.

“Heavy rains and subsequent muds / floods have affected several highways inland BC,” the British Columbia Ministry of Transport said on Twitter.

A view of a road near Popkume in British Columbia, Canada, on November 14, 2021 after mudslides and floods [Courtesy of British Columbia Transportation/via Reuters]

The storm forced the closure of the Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast. The line has a capacity of 300,000 barrels per day.

Work on the proposed expansion project has also been halted, the operating company said.

Rescues were spread to free people trapped in 80-100 cars and trucks for hours between two mud plains near the town of Agassiz, provincial security minister Mike Farnworth said at a news conference.

People may have to get out of the air, he said, even with high winds “questioning those efforts.”

“The mountain side has just been dismantled,” motorcyclist Paul Deol told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Farnworth said there were “multiple incidents caused by the rain” in the southwest and center of the province, and described the situation as “dynamic.”

“The weather is very hard.”

Approximately 29 km (18 miles) east, images posted on Facebook showed that parts of a road had been cleared near the town of Hope.

In the city of Abbotsford, on the outskirts of Vancouver, authorities ordered the evacuation of more than 100 homes in several neighborhoods threatened by floods and mudslides.

Wales will have to hit the area later, and will likely cause power outages, authorities said.

The storm is the second weather-related disaster to hit the Pacific province in just a few months. By the end of June, the temperature had reached a record high It killed more than 500 people and caused a fire to destroy a town.



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