The Sound and the Fury

How Stanley Park was devastated and how it will be reborn.

By John Vaillant

It was when the family pets started circling in a strange and agitated fashion that David Waine, who lives in the Brockton Point caretaker’s residence on the eastern edge of Stanley Park, knew it was time to pray. Shortly before 4 a.m. last December 15, one of the worst storms in Vancouver’s short history was surging toward its crescendo, and Waine and his wife, Normande, had already been up for hours.

They’ve lived in the park for 11 years through all kinds of weather, but that morning was different; they were hearing sounds in the woods that they had never heard before. What the Waines and many other Vancouverites experienced that morning, as forests from Port Alberni to Prospect Park were being torn limb from limb, were some of the same sensations described by survivors of Hurricane Juan, the borderline Category 2 that generated winds of over 150 km/h and ran roughshod over the Maritimes in 2003. “The wind was like a freight train whipping by,” Waine recalled. “The house was shaking, windows rattling. You could hear big trees splitting open and the thud of them falling all around us. It was an ungodly noise.” So the Waines prayed as their animals paced and, minutes later, at precisely 4:08, a 75-foot cedar tree fell squarely on top of their house. Meanwhile, on the other side of English Bay, at almost exactly the same moment, heritage homes were being shaken to their 90-year-old foundations, just as they had been during the Seattle earthquake of 2001 (which registered 6.8 on the Richter Scale). In Burnaby, Paul Lawson, UBC’s research forests manager, was also wide awake and learning the hard way that big Pacific storms don’t just blow, they suck—so hard, in fact, that the soffits under his roof were literally inhaled into the attic. “I’d never seen that before,” he said. “The wind must have created a vacuum up there; it pulled the boards right out of their tracks.”

Experienced weather watchers are sanguine about this latest storm, referring to it simply as a 30-year event, but it’s clear to those who lived through it that this one was different. Professor Roland Stull is a handsome, sturdy-looking man distinguished by a full, trim beard and black suspenders, and he is the director of UBC’s Geophysical Disaster Computational Fluid Dynamic Centre. From a corner office in the Earth and Ocean Sciences Building, with the help of a very powerful computer “optimized for studying weather-related disasters in mountainous, coastal terrain,” Dr. Stull foretells future traumas to our coast. But on the day I visit him, we use his Macintosh looking glass to gaze into the past. “On the 13th (of December),” he explains, pointing at a satellite image of the North Pacific, “a cyclone was detected here, due south of the Gulf of Alaska and due west of northern California.” Over the course of two days and a thousand miles, this “extra-tropical system” would metastasize into one of the most powerful storms Vancouver has ever seen. Stull predicted its progress and, using several animated graphic aids, he now unleashes it on Vancouver, over and over again at different speeds. It’s an amazing sensation to stop a storm in its tracks, to coil and uncoil a whirling low-pressure system like a garden hose. But no amount of back button would raise those fallen trees.

What becomes clear after repeated viewings is that the weather events leading up to December 15 were actually very confused. During the night of the 14th, the surface level winds in Georgia Strait blew from every possible direction, resulting in repeated collisions and battles for dominance. Similar meteorological skirmishes were playing out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. By around 2 a.m. on the 15th, the centre of this deep and fast-moving low was already past us, but the sting in this storm was in the tail and it manifested in the Georgia Strait as an exceptionally strong and well-organized northwesterly. By 3 a.m., the Strait was concentrating and focussing the wind like a gun barrel, and guess what it was aiming at.

It was around this time that Eric Meagher, maintenance supervisor for Stanley Park, was jacked into consciousness by his ringing phone: trees were coming down on the Stanley Park Causeway, Pipeline Road, all over the park. Something extraordinary was happening, but no one was sure what. That night, the barometer reached a low of 97.8, comparable to what you’d see in a Category 2 hurricane. At Race Rocks off Victoria, the winds peaked at 126 km/h, and a gust of 118 km/h was registered at Point Atkinson, but there is no reading for Stanley Park.

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