VIEWPOINTS

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Editor’s Note: This month we turn from opinion pieces to a cautionary tale wherein a West Ender and veteran community planner extrapolates from the findings of numerous studies and reports to imagine a frightening future for our community. It’s a chilling prospect, but recent news from around the world, from major storms and floods to last month’s damage to the Stanley Park seawall by a mudslide, should make us think, and wonder if we’re ready.

A WEST END CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
Do We Think It Couldn’t Happen Here?

By Wendy Sarkissian

It happens on a hot August evening, the kind Vancouver never used to have before our summers turned tropical and wrong. The forecast had mentioned “record king tide with severe winds,” but that didn’t prepare me.

Not for this.

Wendy Sarkissian.

Walking home along Beach Avenue, I notice how English Bay’s water bulges high against the seawall—already splashing over where the roots of the great old trees are exposed and black with salt. Out on the sand, tourists lounge with surfboards and bright towels, children chase each other with buckets, while farther out, the silhouettes of the twelve big freighters seem disturbingly close. They ride high, swing their hulls in uneasy synchrony.

Then the sky darkens with sudden wind. I’m just passing the 7-Eleven on Denman when the clouds let loose—a screaming, sideways rain so intense the drains can’t cope. Within minutes, gutters are overflowing, storm grates underwater, and then surge alarms shriek out—sharp, metallic, ignored at first in the cacophony of wind.

English Bay tips.

It doesn’t merely spill, it explodes. A thirty-meter section of seawall collapses with a crack like gunfire. Fat green waves leap over the concrete, tearing benches, trees, and bikes loose. Picnic baskets, blankets, and lost flip-flops tumble with the water. Buses on Denman Street grind to a halt, swarmed by currents too deep for their axles. Taxis fight to U-turn, horns blare, red brake lights disappear into brown surge.

Beach Avenue is instantly a canal. Waves pour into the Sylvia Hotel—the ivy and brick resist, but the ocean smashes through the bar, drowning the parquet. The staff tries to form a living chain up the grand staircase. But guests are swept along. Tablecloths and silver trays mix with broken glass. Next door, every high-rise ground floor and parking garage floods. I can glimpse Audis and Volvos afloat like doomed animals, spinning in fluorescent-lit water, alarms keening.

On Denman Street, No Frills supermarket disappears first. A black-and-yellow sign vanishes under a meter of filth. The UPS, Specsavers, lawyers, accountants, travel agent—all their windows buckle. Paperwork, packages, and sandwiches twirling by. Downstairs, Dollarama is a drowning green blur: baskets and plastic toys swirl, the echo of a store announcement garbled and lost beneath the waterline. The café’s chairs slam against the jewelers, the dentists. Espresso mixes with salt and sewage, the air reeking of diesel from a submerged bus’s ruptured tank.

Kay’s Place—so often a safe harbour for lost and searching elders—is a spinning chaos. Wheelchairs and pamphlets, mugs and jackets, swirl together. Shoppers Drug Mart’s front doors shatter as the water climbs. It sweeps cosmetics, prescriptions, magazines, and entire shelves out onto Denman Street. They swirl around the feet of a lifeguard still in her red uniform, face blank with disbelief.

The trees along English Bay—their trunks scarred from years of high water—crack and topple. They crash into the sand or drift across Beach Avenue where gulls wheel, screaming overhead. The freighters in English Bay strain at their chains. One breaks loose, scrapes against another. Their hulls collide with the thunder of a distant storm.

On Barclay Street, I join a mass of shivering, soaked people scrambling uphill. The corner at Barclay and Nicola is littered with silt and someone’s potted geranium, a child’s yellow kayak jammed into the Diamond Centre for Living’s veranda railings. Its basement is lost to the flood: thick with mud and ruined laundry. The upper veranda holds—barely, as muddy water splashes at the top step.

Next door, historic Barclay Manor is encircled by sodden gardens and brown water, the white paint streaked with filth. Farther uphill there’s less damage, but the sounds of panic and loss echo off every façade.

All night the rain keeps falling. The city’s lights tremble, then fade. Emergency radios hiss between dead static and desperate voices: “Stay where you are… help on the way.” Back at my apartment on Nelson Street, I stare out from a darkened window at a city transformed into a drowned memory, the old order of streets and trees and homes lost beneath the indifferent crush of rising seas.

This is what climate grief feels like: the world rewritten by water, the ache of familiarity washed away. Survivors left ankle-deep in a strange new land.

I sit at my apartment window, blessedly on the third floor. I’ve climbed 32 steps. The elevator’s out. Again.

And I remind myself: this is climate breakdown. We knew this was coming.

We were warned.

REFERENCES

The author has provided numerous other references, which are available on request to the editor at editor@thewestendjournal.ca.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Canadian-born Dr. Wendy Sarkissian has lived in the West End since 2017. Formerly a community planner and planning academic in Australia, she is now a full-time author, ethicist, and activist. Her books include: “Creative Community Planning”; “Kitchen Table Sustainability”; and “Housing as if People Mattered”. Her most recent book is a climate memoir, “Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues”.

You can find out more at www.creeksongbook.com.