What you will see tonight on The Fifth Estate is a departure from what we normally do, in that it is not the product of months of meticulous research.

It is in fact the culmination of a week’s work — driven by our teams’ collective shock at the images of catastrophic flooding in British Columbia over the past several days. We shared the sadness of seeing thousands of homes lost, people displaced and five people killed in mudslides. Highways, rail lines, and dikes: damaged. Livestock and livelihoods: devastated. Instead of our planned episode for this week, we quickly changed course and focused our attention on the catastrophe.

Tonight we examine what happened and, as Mark Kelley says in his script, whether we should’ve all simply seen this coming.

That’s because of what we’ve found documented in reports that date back as many as six years, warning that the dike protecting the Sumas Prairie was “too low,” “substandard” and “likely needs to be updated.” And that the provincial and federal governments have invested much less in flood mitigation in the past two decades, leaving municipalities and First Nations unable to pay the millions of dollars required to repair the dikes that protect their communities.

We also ask why residents of Washington state, who were exposed to the same vicious rain storm, got a warning to sandbag their property and get livestock to higher ground; a warning that most in B.C. didn’t get.