A flood wiped out their farm. Now house insurance is off the table

As Shoshauna Routley paddled away from her flooded farm with her husband, dog and two cats, she saw her life’s work slip underwater.

When atmospheric rivers hit much of southern B.C. in 2021, Routley’s farm flooded. First, the water seeped into Healthy Hooch, the kombucha brewery she co-founded with her husband. The water crept uphill, across their 10-acre property in Abbotsford, B.C., to their house. By the time neighbours picked them up in their canoe, “there was water all the way to our neighbour's house. It's like your house is floating in a lake,” she said.

When they needed to rebuild, Routley filed a claim with her insurance company. While she was able to replace her equipment and repair her facilities, Routley was unable to insure her house for overland flooding on the same property. She’s not alone.

According to Aaron Sutherland, a spokesperson for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, up to 10 per cent of Canadians can’t insure their homes for flooding because insurance companies have deemed their region at high risk.

“There are homes right along our waterways that are expected to flood every 10 or 20 years,” Sutherland said. “You simply can't create an affordable flood insurance product for those properties because that risk is so high.”

The Sumas Prairie is one of those areas. For five years, Routley and her husband, Will, worked tirelessly to grow their business. In 2019, they sold their house to buy a space in Abbotsford where they could brew and bottle the beverage.

They built a bottling and brewing facility on their lot and hired people to help. They planted hundreds of lavender plants and blackcurrant trees on their property to use in their brews.

In 2021, after record rainfall, the Nooksack River breached and the Sumas Prairie flooded back into the shape of an ancient lake that once stood there. At first, the Routleys tried to lift what they could away from the water. They stacked wooden pallets to raise glass bottles of kombucha six feet off the ground. For days, they watched their business flood. One night, their basement was nearly filled with water.

“It was really dark out, the moon shining and there's just this sea right outside our window,” she said. “I was really having trouble comprehending what was happening because I was like, ‘Where is the water coming from?’

“So much was riding on our business. We invested everything,” she said. “It was a very traumatic experience for me because it just felt like Armageddon and so much was unknown.”

Routley returned to a mess. The flood had picked up a shipping container full of product and floated it 200 metres into a dike. Coolers, fridges and tanks had toppled over and crashed. Wooden pallets had crumbled under the force of the water. She said the whole facility had been smothered in a layer of silt from the river bottom, and “there was broken glass everywhere. We had a pallet of sugar that just melted into the floor.”

All around Routley, farmers and residents saw floods damage their homes and livelihoods. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the climate-fuelled floods caused about $675 million in insured damage.

For the Routleys, the insurable cost of the flood was about $380,000. For Routley’s husband, dealing with their insurance company became a full-time job. She said they suggested a cleanup company.

“We had calculated that if this company were to come in and help us clean up, we already would have been through all of our insurance,” she said. Instead, friends and family helped clean up the damage.

The Routleys used their insurance payout to replace a glass bottling line, a forklift, a tractor, freezers, coolers, computers and order new inventory.

Other damage couldn't be insured. Her home was relatively unscathed, but her basement had fully flooded. “There's still moisture trapped down there, and you can still smell it sometimes,” she said.

The Routleys’ lavender and blackcurrant trees were completely destroyed. While they use those plants in their kombucha, they didn’t produce enough fruit to insure the plants as a business, she said.

They paid more than $100,000 to repair the rest of their equipment. Since the floods, Routley’s premiums have shot up. While she paid $40,000 annually to insure her business, she now pays more than $50,000 per year. They still are unable to insure their home for flooding.

Sutherland said in areas that are expected to flood frequently, insurance companies would have to charge extremely high premiums to offer insurance. Instead of charging premiums in the tens of thousands of dollars, Sutherland said insurance companies just won’t offer flooding policies in those areas.

“If your home is expected to flood once every 10 years, your insurance company almost has to charge you $10,000 a year to break even,” he said. “That's not a viable situation.”

Climate researchers expect extreme weather, like flooding and heavy rainfall, will occur more frequently with climate change.

Now two and a half years later, Healthy Hooch is back on the shelves. Routley and her husband have expanded their business, and own several beverage brands under their company, The Functional Beverage Group. And while the risk of flooding makes Routley uneasy, she said at the moment, it’s too expensive to move.

“Our goal is to move off of the property as quickly as we can, which is really sad. It's a beautiful spot,” Routley said. “We had big dreams for the property … but now, those aren’t even a possibility because we're just too worried about a flood.”