Unusual atmospheric river will impact B.C. for days, even after it ends, says expert

VANCOUVER — Emergency officials say residents stranded by an early morning mudslide in Coquitlam, B.C., on Thursday have been safely extracted by helicopter, but a meteorologist warns such slides remain a possibility as an atmospheric river continues to drench the province.

RCMP say they were called to a rural area near the Upper Coquitlam River just after 5:30 a.m. following reports of a mudslide north of the Upper Coquitlam River Park. Coquitlam Search and Rescue said in a social media post that its crews started to rescue residents, who were stranded on the north end of Pipeline Road, just before 10 a.m.

The post said all eight residents, two dogs and one cat living in the area were extracted by a helicopter by 2:45 p.m.

BC Hydro said the slide knocked down a power line, temporarily leaving some 5,000 people without power. The utility expected power to be restored to all affected customers late Thursday or early Friday, but noted crews were having difficulty accessing the damage due to the unstable ground.

A mudslide on Thursday also forced TransLink to temporarily suspend all West Coast Express train service for commuters in Metro Vancouver for the afternoon. A spokesperson for Canadian Pacific Kansas City, which owns the track, could not give any additional information about when service might resume.

Rainfall warnings were in place on western Vancouver Island, the Fraser Valley, Howe Sound, Sea to Sky and parts of the Metro Vancouver regions.

The forecast called for up to 130 millimetres of rain to fall before Friday, with some places already reporting in excess of 200 millimetres since the atmospheric river event made landfall Sunday.

“We typically don’t seem to get atmospheric rivers this time of year that are quite this strong,” Environment Canada meteorologist Brian Proctor said in an interview, noting the Pacific region around Hawaii is the source of the rain.

“So, the warmer an air mass is, the more moisture it can carry, and when you get an atmospheric river, you basically start directing it like a fire hose onto certain portions of the coast.”

Other British Columbians were also anxious about the stability of nearby slopes, including those living in parts of the Central Coast Regional District along B.C.’s central coast.

The district said late Wednesday that it placed parts of the community under an evacuation order following an aerial assessment of local slopes, and on Thursday it said a local state of emergency covered the entire area that includes Ocean Falls, B.C.

While nobody resides in the newly declared evacuation zone, the district said the order was a precautionary measure, as the landslide hazard was very high.

The atmospheric river has also brought unseasonable warmth, breaking century-old daily temperature records in several Interior communities.

Those include Kamloops, where the temperature reached 21.8 C on Wednesday, breaking the record set in 1910, as well as in Quesnel and Salmon Arm, where records set in 1901 and 1915 were broken.

Salmon Arm’s high temperature reached 21.7 C on Wednesday, shattering the old mark of 16.7 C.

Proctor said the system causing the atmospheric river will be over by Friday morning, but B.C. will need a prolonged period of dry weather for things to settle down. He said drainage basins are beyond their capacity to run off the moisture. The higher temperature raises the risk of avalanches in B.C.’s Rockies, he added.

He also said strong winds could be coming, which he said could knock down a lot of trees, whose roots will already be saturated. And he said the warm temperatures have decimated the snowpack on Vancouver Island and some of the coastal mountains, which means less water will be available in the spring.

“So, that’s always, always a concern from an agricultural, from an industrial, even from a residential point of view, as well as a fire weather point of view,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 19, 2026.

Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press