KAMLOOPS — Numerous homes and properties in Kamloops and in the Thompson Nicola Regional District have been damaged by flooding creeks and rivers over the past few weeks.
At the B.C. Wildlife Park, the Dipper Falls trail has been washed away by the rising waters of Campbell Creek.
The trail is now closed for the summer.
“This is the worst I’ve seen Campbell Creek and the flooding around the park in the 20 years that I’ve been here,” said the B.C. Wildlife Park’s general manager Glenn Grant.
The raging waters have completely eroded the park’s nature walk, and it’s unclear how badly the trail has been damaged further upstream.
“We’ll probably assess after the water goes down what we actually need to fix, and what we need to repair, how much that will cost,” Grant said. “We’ll be looking at starting some of the work late fall, early next spring, and have it ready for summer 2018.”
Meantime, the park’s mountain goats have been moved from an enclosure running parallel to the defunct nature walk.
“The fence is still in place, but there is a danger of it being taken out by the water,” Grant said. “So, we just moved them down to the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and they live quite fine in the wild so we figured why wouldn’t they live fine here together?”
The animals are safe in their new location, and no other animals or buildings have been threatened by the flood waters.
However, a staff service road running along the west side of the park was temporarily washed out after the creek breached its banks.
“We had a lot of help, we had a lot of volunteers come, Valleyview Secondary, we put a post on Facebook, we had 50 volunteers come out here and sandbag and help us, so that was huge.”
With the water slowly receding Grant hopes the worst is over, and encourages the community to come together for property owners still struggling to keep the high water out of their homes.
