Flood waters began to recede from the Fraser Valley on Friday, leaving residents and farmers to assess damage and demand answers as to why more hasn’t been done to heed lessons from the devastating B.C. floods of four years ago.

Poultry farmer Corry Spitters said this year’s flooding rose to within an inch of one of his chicken barns.

Hundreds of people and countless livestock in British Columbia’s agricultural heartland were displaced Thursday after torrential rainfall and historic flooding that forced mass evacuations in Washington State and swept north across the border.

For those in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, the scenes of swollen rivers, washed-out highways and flooded farmland stirred uncomfortable memories of the catastrophic flood of November, 2021, the province’s costliest natural disaster.

First Nations are pressing the Carney government to obey a four-year-old court settlement and pass long-promised drinking water legislation before year’s end or risk more legal action.

Bill C-61, the First Nations Clean Water Act, died on the order paper with the spring election call. Introduced in 2023, the proposed legislation would have set minimum standards for drinking water on reserves, acknowledged First Nations’ jurisdiction over water on their lands and recognized safe drinking water as a human right.

Residents in North Bay are suing their city and the Department of Defence, alleging that firefighting foams used on a military site contaminated their wells with chemicals that have been linked to an array of health problems.

The class-action lawsuit, filed in Ontario Superior Court of Justice, seeks $100-million for losses in property values and $5-million for punitive damages. It excludes any claims for possible health issues linked to the chemical exposure, which stems from the use of toxic firefighting foams at the city’s Jack Garland Airport and an adjacent Canadian Forces base.