Key takeaways:
- The river consumed our farm, but we’re going to make it green again, states Brandie Coutts.
- Brandie and Michael Coutts, and their young daughter Luna, are working to stabilize a portion of their property that was cleaned away by floodwaters last November in the community of Spence’s Bridge.
Brandie, Michael, and their young daughter Luna have been unrolling elongate burlap sheets and gambling willow tree cuttings into a vertical, loose dirt bank on their effects for the past few weeks.
The family of three owns a small farm in the neighborhood of Spences Bridge, B.C., one of the dozens of properties close to highway 8 that were impaired by terrible floods the previous November.
After five months of living with friends in nearby Ashcroft, the household says they’re committed to reconstructing a large part of their property, home to an orchard and a chicken coop, by stabilizing the bank.
“It was flourishing, and it is gone. It’s a beach now.
Everything on it is dispersed to the four winds,” Brandie Coutts told the CBC’s Radio West Thursday.
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Highway 8 through the neighborhood is still experiencing restorations after a long stretch of the road was lost to the raging river.
Transportation Minister Rob Fleming stated he couldn’t estimate when the highway would reopen in late March. Still, more details will be released in the coming months in collaboration with the federal government.
Coutts stated the family can still only access their farm and haul supplies by chopper, and they’ve been making week-long trips to their property while they reconstruct.
Coutts said a chopper pilot with Valley Helicopters, who had seen their farmstead for years, “endeared” himself to the family and provided free helicopter rides, given their home lies in the direction he flies each day.
“The river consumed our farm,” stated Coutts, “[and] we’re helicopter hitchhikers.”
Source – cbc.ca
