Half a dozen employees from a West Vancouver hearing clinic are helping patients at a local community centre for the foreseeable future as they still face damage in their building from atmospheric river flooding in October.
Mandy Fisch is a registered audiologist at HearingLife Canada on Bellevue Avenue in West Vancouver, and said she expects to be operating out of temporary locations for up to a year due to severe water damage in their building.
“This has been the most stressful experience of my professional career besides COVID,” Fisch said. “Our priority has been serving our clients and making sure they don’t feel deserted, letting them know we are there for them setting up a temporary location.”
People across the Lower Mainland saw 292 millimetres of precipitation fall over three days from Oct. 19 to 21, forcing some to evacuate amidst devastating damage to homes and businesses.
Bellevue Avenue and the surrounding area quickly began to fill with water Oct. 19, reaching Fisch’s clinic quickly. Water went down the clinic’s parking lot reaching the back door, submerging the building’s electrical room in more than two and a half metres of water filled with debris and other materials.
It took more than three days to get the water out using a generator and dehumidifiers, which were hard to find because of high demand in the days following the storm, Fisch said, adding that most of the equipment in the clinic has been damaged, with an estimated replacement cost of nearly $70,000.
Although Fisch has insurance that will cover most expenses, it will take a while to replace the equipment and she doesn’t have a permanent place to put the new gear.
Care limitations
Fisch and her team have been renting a room at the West Vancouver Community Centre for just over two weeks to provide care for the thousands of patients they have.
Fisch’s husband built a divider for the room to keep confidentiality between clients, with two members working in the room at a time, she said. Hearing clinics require specific equipment if medical or rehabilitation treatment is needed.
“Do they need hearing aids or other assistive devices to help them hear better? That is a lot of what I do, and I can’t do it right now,” Fisch said.
But due to the damaged equipment and their new location, providing care to patients – who are primarily seniors - has come with limitations, she said.
“We cannot see the volume of people that we were seeing before, so we can’t help as many people in one day, which is very frustrating,” Fisch said. “I’m used to having four offices, and now I have one large room that I’m helping people in.”
Fisch has seen care patient numbers cut down in half, from nearly 40 people a day to now an average of 15 to 20.
She has had to borrow equipment from other colleagues through other HearingLife Canada branches and rent two rooms at the Lonsdale location in North Vancouver.
Uncertainty looms of finding new location
Finding a new location for her business has been one of the biggest challenges due to limited options of retail space, she said.
There’s no power in the previous building, and with the news that it could take anywhere from eight months to a year before the power comes back on, Fisch said she needed to terminate her lease and will try to find a new location.
“Because of the risk of this happening again with global warming, I can’t take the risk,” she said. “I unfortunately can’t envisage how many people may not come back because of this or lack of availability … I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to find a new premises.”
The audiologist has seen a lot of change throughout her career the past three decades, but nothing like this, she said. Despite the flooding, Fisch is staying optimistic moving forward.
Fisch said her team will be moving to the HearingLife Canada Lonsdale location at the end of the month until they find a permanent place, and a colleague will be working at the community centre one day a week.
Abby Luciano is the Indigenous and civic affairs reporter for the North Shore News. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative. [email protected]
