Image Credit: CFJC Today / Dave Barry

By James Peters

B.C. Flood

New runoff patterns from Elephant Hill wildfire affecting Bonaparte River at Cache Creek

Jul 11, 2020 | 12:43 PM

CACHE CREEK, B.C. — Officials in Cache Creek say the behaviour of the Bonaparte River this year may be directly related to the damage done by the massive Elephant Hill wildfire in 2017.

The Bonaparte is slowly receding this weekend after heavy rainfall on Canada Day resulted in its third peak of the spring.

Cache Creek communications manager Wendy Coomber says this week was the third time the community believed the river had reached its highest level of the season.

“Even the B.C. River Forecast Centre said that some of the things that the river is doing this year have also caught them by surprise,” Coomber told CFJC Today. “It’s pretty unheard of for the Bonaparte to have three peaks in one freshet.”

After the Elephant Hill fire scorched thousands of hectares in the summer of 2017, scientists had predicted there would be an impact on runoff. Coomber says that new runoff activity has never been as pronounced as it has been in 2020.

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“When the headwaters of your watershed burn and, in the case of Cache Creek, it was quite heavily logged previous to that, it’s going to affect a lot of things,” said Coomber. “There’s not the trees to soak up the moisture; there are no trees to slow down the rate of snow melt.”

“We kind of got caught off guard last year because nothing happened, so we thought, ‘Hey, everything’s fine.’ But I guess we’re back into it,” she added.

While initial high levels this spring can be largely attributed to the melt of the above-normal snowpack, B.C. River Forecast Centre officials say that is no longer a factor this late in the season. That leaves rainfall as the only cause.

“This last peak was absolutely caused only by the rain that fell on July 1,” Coomber said.

Cache Creek officials are now contemplating what they will do next if heavy rainfall events alone will have such a drastic impact on Bonaparte River levels.