Biggest storm since the ’80s slams the Point

By Meg Olson

At 8:30 a.m. on February 4 Lee Williams listened as a log five feet in diameter and 15 feet long pounded down the row of cottages at Crystal Water Beach, driven by waves as tall as his cabin. “It sounded like a Japanese bell, a beautiful tone in a scary way,” he said.

As the tide got higher the waves got bigger and Williams went to higher ground watching the giant logs tear off porches and siding. Then the winds changed as the tide turned. “They started coming back down the row,” Williams said, pummeling the cottages again. One of the three cottages owned by the Schonberg family was ripped off its foundation and would have floated out to sea if it hadn’t been wedged in by a raft of rolling driftwood.

Carol Viner was at work at the International Marketplace and knowing high tide was at 9:22 she called to check on her husband Gary in the Edwards Drive home that has been in her family for decades. “He said the water’s coming in. My worst nightmare, my house floating out in the water,” she said. “I clocked out and went to Nielsen’s to buy boots.”

Viner was born into the Julius family, Point Roberts pioneers that farmed the low areas along the shore. She keeps a scrapbook of attacks by the sea. The last one was December 16, 1982. “It was worse,” she said. “It took out half the road in Boundary Bay.” The storm of legend, she said, was in 1932, when flood water came all the way up to her family’s barn at what was to become the intersection of Tyee Drive and APA Road. “It took them two years to clear away all the debris,” she said.

At Maple Beach, Blaine Anderson said his cabin, in the family since the 1940s fared worse than in previous storms. “My power panel is underwater,” he said. “We’ve had water in the backyard before but never in the house like this. We’ll wait for it to go down and pump it out – get rid of pretty much everything I guess.”

“I can remember when I was a little kid it came up to this stop sign,” said Bob Mitchell as he waded down Alder Street. “Hasn’t been this bad in a long time.”

After the 1932 storm Viner said her family lobbied state senator A.E. Edwards, the namesake of Edwards Drive, to get dikes built to protect the lowlands. This storm has also taught lessons about how to protect against future ones, Williams said.