Crisis/Disaster/Emergency: The Flooding of the Fraser Valley 1936-1998

Keywords: social crisis, flood, natural disaster, British Columbia, historical geography, cultural studies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 41

Abstract

In May of 1948, the Province of British Columbia declared a state of emergency due to a massive flood in the Fraser Valley. This flood, while perhaps exceptionally large, followed the same physical geography as other floods on the Fraser River: snow accumulated in the mountains during the winter and quickly rising temperatures in the spring caused the snow to melt, suddenly raising the water level dramatically. The 1948 flood is unique, however, in that it precipitated efforts to dyke the Fraser and prevent flooding in the future. Drawing primarily on archival resources from around British Columbia, this paper explores the limits of the category of natural disaster through the history of flooding in the Fraser Valley from roughly 1936-1998. Why are some floods memorialized while others are forgotten? Why did the flood of 1948 engender massive military mobilization while the more minor floods of the late 20th century were ignored by the provincial and federal governments? As natural disasters become an increasingly prominent effect of global warming, it is an urgent theoretical task to understand the relation between extreme weather events like floods and the social crises through which these events are lived. Synthesizing the germinal work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag, Stuart Hall's essays on Thatcherism, and Naomi Klein's notion of disaster capitalism with this history, I suggest that what we colloquially call natural disasters are really the articulation of a physical disaster, a (tenuously related) social crisis, and a political state of emergency.