KAMLOOPS —The windstorm that passed through the BC Interior last night led to a few power outages and downed trees, but it may have caused the most damage on Kamloops Lake.
Kerry Wiebe owns Bruker Marina at the Tobiano resort.
He says, in his six years on Kamloops Lake, he has never seen anything like this storm.
“We had eight foot swells — boats were going eight feet in the air. Boats broke, cleats were torn right out of docks,” said Wiebe. “The whole docking system is all in good shape, it hasn’t really moved any. We had boats in A dock that were down in C dock, we had boats that were floating around that we had to tie up.”
“This morning I was back at 5:00 a.m. and we actually found one boat down the lake a bit, still by the Tobiano Resort but probably about four football fields down the lake towards Kamloops.”
“There are a couple of older gentlemen that have boats in the marina that said this is history, they’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I had my truck on the launch ramp. A wave came that was so big it broke on the hood of my truck, so that had got to be five to six feet when it hits shore.”
Wiebe says the marina’s main dock structure is still intact, but there is plenty of damage to both infrastructure and boats themselves.
“The boats that got loose have all got damage. My gas dock has a big cement floating platform that it is on, so it’s heavy and it damaged the docks around it. I have a houseboat that is a floating store with a heavy upper deck, so it damaged some docks around it, too. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A video Wiebe took shows twin water spouts dancing across the lake during the storm.
Wiebe says even though the damage is extensive, the marina will be open for business as soon as the weather is right for boating and watersports.
