Roberts Creek

Name: MyCottageWatch.com
Address: BC, CA
Telephone: 1-800-483-4151

Roberts Creek has no town centre — a hall, a store, a fire hall at the highway and several thousand people on large forested lots. What goes wrong here goes wrong quietly, under trees, at the end of a driveway nobody drives down.

Where Roberts Creek sits on the Coast. We cover every community on this map, from Langdale to Egmont. The other town names are links — click one to read about it.

Nine out of ten homes are single detached houses, and almost half were built before 1981.

The trees

On the morning of 28 July 2024 a branch fell onto the BC Hydro service line at a house on Beach Avenue. It pulled the mast off the wall and the arcing set the roof alight. The owners were in Whistler. Neighbours saw the smoke, called it in, and gave the fire department the door code so the crew did not have to break in. The first firefighter arrived seven minutes after the page. The fire was stopped as it was entering the wall and roof structure.

That house was saved by two things: a neighbour who was home, and a neighbour who had the code. Most empty houses in Roberts Creek have neither.

The Roberts Creek fire department covers 28.5 square kilometres. Its maximum membership is 30, but the SCRD says "membership is commonly 15-20 responders." When the Orange Road house burned in November 2023 it was three-quarters involved by the time the trucks arrived. The chief's description of what mutual aid provides is worth reading:

Sometimes you get another truck full of water if you're distant from a fire hydrant.
Chief Higgins, Roberts Creek Volunteer Fire Department, November 2023

Much of Roberts Creek above the highway — Flume Road, Lockyer Road, upper Roberts Creek, B&K Road, Largo Road — is on private wells, with no hydrants at all.

The department's list of notable calls for 2021 included "the November flooding, a horse stuck in a sink hole and a tree falling on a house." In November 2024 trees blocked Lower Road from Leek Road to the highway and closed Highway 101 at Flume Road; Roberts Creek was without power overnight. BC Hydro has said publicly that years of drought have weakened the trees that come down in these storms.

The water

Roberts Creek's roads cross a series of creeks: Flume, Clack, Gough, Whittaker, Stephens. In November 2021 the atmospheric river took out Lower Road at Stephens Road and the culverts at Beach Avenue, Day Road and Flume Road. When the permanent repair contract was awarded in 2024, the report noted that "some residents' road access was entirely cut off in 2021." Two cabins on Ocean Beach Esplanade were put under evacuation order when creek debris filled one of them with gravel four feet deep. The one next door had been buried up to its deck twice in the previous twenty months. Permanent repairs to the roads were not finished until October 2025.

The properties that were cut off in 2021 were cut off for weeks. An empty house behind a washed-out culvert is not going to be checked by anyone who is not already on that side of it.

The break-ins that get reported here are the ones with witnesses

Roberts Creek does not produce many police statistics. In the last quarter of 2023 it recorded 125 calls for service — the most of any rural community on the Coast — but the RCMP presents rural figures to the regional district in closed meetings and the weekly police report in the Coast Reporter stopped in 2022.

What has been reported gives the pattern. A boat on its mooring in the 3400 block of Beach Avenue was taken overnight in July 2022 and found nearby stripped of its 15-horsepower outboard, oars and rod holders. Thieves cut the lock on the fire hall's own compound in September 2023 and drained the diesel tank. Above Roberts Creek, twenty mature trees were cut on Crown land "seemingly for firewood." An excavator was taken from a Malcolm Creek Road job site overnight. A homeowner on the highway woke at five in the morning to find a stranger in his living room.

Across the Coast, the Conservation Officer Service said in August 2026 that "incidents like bears breaking into homes are on the rise." A bear that gets into an empty kitchen does not leave on its own.

The census says 246 homes had nobody in them

The 2021 census counted 1,796 private dwellings in Roberts Creek and 1,550 with usual residents. The other 246 — one in seven — were seasonal, secondary or empty. Median age is 51 and 28 per cent of residents are over 65. Median house value was a million dollars.

What a check in Roberts Creek covers

Every visit follows the same list and produces the same photographed record:

The driveway itself: trees down, branches on the service line, the culvert at the road
Doors, windows, sheds, the boat, the trailer, the generator
Heat on and holding; smell of smoke, gas or damp
Water: under sinks, the hot-water tank, the pump house if you are on a well
Ceilings and walls for staining; the crawlspace after heavy rain
Roof and gutters from the ground, needles and moss
Signs of animals — scat, torn screens, a pried door
After a storm: an extra visit for trees, lines and power

If you give us a key and the alarm code, the fire department does not have to guess — and we keep a record of every entry.

Most home insurance policies require an empty house to be checked at set intervals during the heating season — often within four days — by a "competent person," or the water shut off and drained. The written record from each visit is what the insurer asks for.

What it costs

A scheduled check is $55 a visit, plus $10 travel. The travel charge is the same everywhere between Gibsons and Egmont. There is no minimum term and no joining fee. See the full price list.

Where these facts come from

Every figure, date and quotation on this page was taken from one of these. They are listed so you can read them yourself.

Checked 11 September 2026. Newspaper and government pages do move. If a link no longer works, tell us and we will find where it went.

Book a check in Roberts Creek

$55 a visit

Scheduled, photographed checks on empty cottages and homes in Roberts Creek, Lower Road, Beach Avenue, Ocean Beach Esplanade, Flume Road, Lockyer Road and upper Roberts Creek.

Get a quote

Or call 1-800-483-4151.

We attend

Not on the list? Call and ask — it is almost certainly a yes.

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