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On a sunny Friday morning, Kelly Ziebart walks through mountains of mud and dead grass that have heaved off the hills, just south of Fort St John, B.C.
“Look how far the road slid down here,” he said, pointing to damage along the closed road into Old Fort. “I think they’re talking 50, 60 metres.”
This is the third landslide to hit the community of roughly 150 people since 2018. Once again, it has destroyed the only road in or out of the hamlet along the Peace River.
This time around, the province says the 400-metre-wide slide has shifted the road approximately 62 metres since Sunday, with the Peace River Regional District indicating the slide remains active.
About half of the community has evacuated and registered with emergency support services. Many others have stayed behind, crossing the broken road on foot or ATV to get to work and school or check in on neighbours.
Ziebart says while his home of two decades is a beautiful place to live and raise a family, there’s now a sense of uneasiness about the future.
“Will you ever see value again in your residence?” he asked. “Are you going to be able to sell your place and make money on it and go into retirement? You know, there’s a lot of things like this. Is it a safe place to live?”
Longtime resident Scott Campbell said while people are taking the current evacuation in relative stride, “It would be really nice if they got to the bottom of why they’re having the slides.” Campbell is wanting a deeper investigation from the province about why the issue keeps recurring.
“It is annoying,” he said. He calls Old Fort “the most beautiful place” in the region, and it makes him want to stay despite the challenges.
The province says geotechnical staff are on site and actively monitoring the slide’s movement, but it won’t be able to restore road access until the slide stops.
Darrell Gunn of the B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Transit told CBC Radio West host Sarah Penton that the underlying geography of the community makes a permanent fix challenging.
“There’s a deep seated instability [in] the makeup of the geology of the soil in the area,” he said.
He said while the melting snowpack, higher than average, is a factor for this event, the real issue is the ongoing instability of the area.
Brad Sperling, the regional district director representing Old Fort, called the situation “nerve-wracking,” while also expressing some frustration with the recurring nature of the province and calling for more studies on the reason for the slides.
Gunn acknowledged the concerns and said that as had been done after previous slides, a deep dive would be taken into the cause of the slide, outlining “what we have learned and what our full set of options are.”
“More work needs to be done,” he said.
Ziebart said whatever comes next, a larger conversation about the future of the community needs to be had.
“It’s unfortunate that the people of the Old Fort community have gotten used to this,” he said.
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