Friday (July 3) at Riverside Park (Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds)

By James Peters

B.C. Flood

Province says rivers have peaked for the season after handling Canada Day rain

Jul 6, 2020 | 11:12 AM

KAMLOOPS — Provincial officials say it appears the largest rivers in the Interior have peaked for the year and will now begin a steady decline.

Dave Campbell of the B.C. River Forecast Centre says a pulse of flow from the Canada Day rain last week has made its way through.

“Most of the larger rivers peaked yesterday, particularly the North Thompson and South Thompson down through Kamloops,” Campbell told CFJC Today. “We’ve actually seen, over the last 12 to 24 hours, some improving trends. The rivers have been dropping off there. That rain, the bulk of it has passed its way through the systems now.”

The situation is still dicey in Cache Creek, where flooding on the Bonaparte River has led to an evacuation. Campbell says seeing a rain pulse come through a little later is not unusual for that particular watershed.

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“The pulse that had been working its way down from the upper headwaters just takes longer to come down. That’s what’s driving the challenges right now, based on quite a heavy amount of rain that happened last week within that part of the watershed,” said Campbell.

Major rivers have seen very high flows for more than a month, but flooding damage to property has been relatively minimal. Now that the bulk of the spring freshet is behind us, Campbell says it happened almost perfectly, considering how much snow was left from the winter.

“We actually saw quite a lot of rain, as well, that’s been added to the rivers and we know that we had very high snowpacks,” noted Campbell. “In a lot of ways, the moderate weather, the cooler weather brought that snow down in a more controlled manner and [we have even been] able to manage some of that rain as well.”

“We’ve had high flows, but not the kind of worst case scenario that we had seen that there was a potential for this year with the snowpack the way it was.”