Rainstorm ravages some North Vancouver businesses while neighbours unscathed

Several homes along Deep Cove's Panorama Drive remain evacuated due to flood damage

Published Oct 21, 2024  •  3 minute read

North Vancouver district councillor Lisa Muri surveys the storm damage in the 2700 block of Panorama Drive in Deep Cove Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /PNG

As torrents of water gushed down Gallant Avenue in Deep Cove over the weekend, parts of the deluge careened down a narrow alleyway behind the Caf/EH coffee shop.

The sheer force of the water and debris destroyed the outdoor patio, kitchen, storage areas, bathrooms and rear seating spaces of the deep blue-painted shop.

“The water just jammed in here and started going under, through the side and underneath the back door and just flooded the bottom area of the coffee shop,” said co-owner Melissa Kinnoch.

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Standing outside the temporarily shuttered café on Monday, she and co-owner George Tsogas said they expect their North Vancouver small business to be closed for at least a few weeks. The interior floors were caked in mud, after pooling water had receded. The power was cut and all the food in the fridge had to be thrown out.

“It’s very dirty. We can’t really do anything until the cleaning is done,” said Kinnoch’s husband, Kris. “It feels very counterproductive. We should be cleaning it, but the process basically says that we need to know what the damage is, what’s there and what we can get our hands on. It’s a waiting game for the restoration guys, the insurance.”

Heavy rainfall can be seen flooding Deep Cove’s Gallant Avenue in this Oct. 19, 2024 photo. Photo by WEST VANCOUVER FIRE /sun

The three of them shook their heads at their terrible luck and marvelled at the randomness of the damage. The front of their café was spared damage from the storm.

Another coffee shop up the street was unscathed and open for business. Businesses on the other side of the street and down slope, such as Deep Cove Pizza and Honey Doughnuts & Goodies, also were undamaged.

At Seymour Art Gallery, a sign on the door said it was closed due to flooding, and FirstMate Pet Foods was also closed and running dehumidifiers inside.

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Staff at Arms Reach Bistro, which sits at the bottom of Gallant Avenue across from the beach in Panorama Park, described how they had rearranged outdoor tables to act as barriers to steer the flow of water cascading down some stairs away from the restaurant’s front doors.

In a residential neighbourhood on Panorama Drive on the north side of Deep Cove, passersby peered over yellow tape to see a large sinkhole in the driveway of one of six properties that residents had been ordered by the District of North Vancouver to evacuate.

A partly submerged Jeep was visible in the driveway that was consumed by mud, water and small boulders.

Some of the passersby mused about money that had been spent on recent upgrades to a storm grate on Gallant, which got overwhelmed with trees and rocks.

“There’s a four-foot section and then a fence, and all the debris stuck on the fence,” said Deb Porter.

Scenes from the 2700 block of Panorama Drive in Deep Cove Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /PNG

A longtime District of North Vancouver councillor, Lisa Muri, said the lesson is that Mother Nature is unpredictable.

“She punches a wallop. Unfortunately, you can engineer as much as you can. Stuff happens. She’s a force. These systems are storms that we haven’t experienced at this intensity,” Muri said from Panorama Drive on Monday.

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Pointing up the steep slope, she added that the tributaries that flow down it can only hold so much. “There were pieces of trees, roots, rocks, things like that. It was a lot of water in a relatively short period of time.”

Judy Dobie has lived in the Deep Cove area since the early 1970s. She was walking around the evacuated homes on Panorama on Monday, but at the height of the weekend storm, she had been at home watching the drama unfold on Facebook feeds from those who live there.

“The atmospheric river was supposed to happen, but nobody anticipated this because of all the drainage projects that we’ve been paying for for years,” she said.

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