By Dylana Milobar

City keeping an eye on flood-prone areas during spring melt

Mar 23, 2019 | 10:16 AM

KAMLOOPS — While monitoring the municipality’s more flood-prone areas, the City of Kamloops hopes those parts won’t be overwhelmed this year, as it works on annual freshet preparations.

Utility Services Manager Greg Wightman says freshet preparation begins early in the year when the snow first starts to fall.

“Its kind of a multi-phase thing. We deal first with the snow melt on the city streets and making sure that all that snow can get to the catch basins and other drainage infrastructure that’s out there intended to take all that melting snow.”

Along with having crews check and clear as many catch basins as they could, this year Wightman says the city also created an app for people to check where the nearest catch basin was for clearing.

“With the help of the residents in the city, we were able to get through a pretty rapid melt of the snow on the streets without any major problems.”

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With the flooding that has come in the past to the Campbell Creek area and other flood prone parts around Kamloops, Wightman says working against mother nature is always a challenge.

“We do what we can to monitor things out there. Unfortunately, the past couple of years we have had Barnhartvale Road be overwhelmed with the amount of snow that’s been coming down.” He explains, “We’re hoping this year with slightly less low and mid-elevation snow, things will be a little bit better out in Campbell Creek and we’ll see a little bit less snow coming down and a more gradual melt. But that’s all predictions at this point.”

Wightman adds, the city’s website has more information on what kind of measures the city is taking to prepare for flooding (accessed here) , along with a link into provincial snowpack data.