ROTHENBURGER: When Oak Hills became a lake; when a mountain came down

By unprecedented, we mean it hasn’t been this bad as far as we can remember. In truth, of course, such events are not at all unprecedented. It’s a matter of degree.

We’re well familiar with wildfires and floods and even massive landslides in this part of the world. There are probably few Kamloops residents around who remember the big flood of 1948, but more will remember 1972, when waters rose even higher.

On a June day in that year, the North Thompson River breached the dike at Oak Hills and turned the low-lying residential subdivision into a lake. People ferried possessions back and forth from their mobile homes by boat to Westsyde Road on higher ground.

Though the flooding that year hit many communities from Prince George all the way down to the Coast, the Oak Hills flood was the most dramatic because we weren’t used to entire communities being flooded.

MLA Phil Gaglardi, who had climbed on a bulldozer and helped build dikes to hold back the waters in 1948, toured the flood zone and offered help from the provincial government. MP David Anderson came as well and, with local Liberals like Bill Mercer and Merv Chertko, and media (me and CFJC’s veteran newscaster Gordon Rye included), trudged along the dike for a look-see as it was being shored up.

Later, a few of us gathered at someone’s home — I think it was Mercer’s — to discuss the situation and listen to what Anderson felt could be done in the way of federal support.

Oak Hills gained the instant moniker of “Soaked Hills.” New diking went up everywhere, including a temporary one the full length of Schubert Drive, right on top of the street.

Oak Hills flooded again only six years ago, this time from a flash flood that roared down the hillside from Parkview Drive and across Westsyde Road. The occupants of 40 mobile homes and 20 other residences were evacuated to the Interior Savings Centre (now Sandman Centre).

In fact, we’re so used to flooding in the Tournament Capital that we think little of it when the Tiger dams go up at Riverside Park, or when the 10th Avenue underpass turns into a deep pond after a heavy rainfall. And four years ago, Campbell Creek overflowed its banks; I recall driving through a long stretch of flooded highway at Westwold that same year.

Such events are, of course, only an irritating reminder that when Mother Nature throws a fit, there’s not much we can do about it, and that we have to be on guard against catastrophic events like the flooding in Merritt and the Lower Mainland.

Better diking has been talked about for 50 years, but short-term politicians have never had the vision or will to get it done.

Mudslides in our immediate area have been minor in comparison to what’s being experienced now but they didn’t seem so minor to Sun Rivers residents who had to deal with one that descended on several homes a few years ago.

One avalanche on the Hope-Princeton rivals anything that has happened in the recent flooding, and it had a Kamloops connection. At 3:56 a.m. on Jan. 9, 1965, a short earthquake caused a small slide 11 miles east of Hope.

The slide hit the valley bottom and tumbled across the highway. Forty-two-year-old Kamloops trucker Norm Stephanishin was one of the first to come upon it and he didn’t like what he saw.

I interviewed him about it many years later. “It was a feeling I had, I suppose, that particular night. It was a weekend, and the traffic was extremely light, and usually on a weekend there were a lot of people travelling to the Interior. It was a strange evening.”

Stephanishin had a premonition about someone, a woman, being killed in an accident. He decided he’d better get out of there and hitched a ride back to Hope on a Greyhound bus that had also been stopped at the slide.

But the worst wasn’t over. I wrote: “Up on the mountain, a massive pressure was building. The carboniferous wall of rock, ridden with cracks, began to falter. A few minutes before 6 a.m., the mountain collapsed. A hundred and twenty-five million tons of rock roared down into the little valley. Rocks the size of houses plummeted for a mile toward the highway, smothering a five-acre lake and rolling toward the trees beside which Norm Stephanishin had parked his truck for protection. Four people, including a woman, were buried in the slide.”

The highway was reconnected in just two weeks. The Hope slide was, at the time, unprecedented.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

by Mel Rothenburger

ROTHENBURGER: When Oak Hills became a lake; when a mountain came down

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