Review urged to see if flood could have been avoided
Summerland town councillor questions whether assessment of snowpack, drainage of lake could have been more accurate
A public review should be launched to determine if Mother Nature is solely responsible for Okanagan Lake reaching flood level this spring, a Summerland councillor urged Thursday.
“The real question is the assessment of the snowpack and soil saturation and the levels (to which) the lake was drawn down to ahead of time,” Richard Barkwill told fellow members of a committee of the board of the Regional District of OkanaganSimilkameen.
“We’ve got 50, 75 years’ experience — and maybe that wasn’t enough experience — but I really hope there is something formal” in the way of a review, he said.
Penticton MLA-elect Dan Ashton, who appeared before the committee, agreed.
“Everybody involved should be dissecting what transpired and how this can be prevented in the future,” he said.
Ashton also, however, defended the provincial government’s response to date, noting existing forecasting models “had to be thrown out the window with the tremendous amount of rainfall we got months ago, with the extraordinary snowpacks in the east and the lighter ones to the west.”
Meanwhile, RDOS community services manager Mark Woods told the committee the Emergency Operations Centre has seen 45 staffers rotate through and accumulate upwards of 1,200 hours of overtime since May 4.
“From an emergency management point of view, the vastness of this flooding event is one of the most challenging things we’ve ever had to deal with,” said Woods.
The centre has also dispatched nearly 500,000 sandbags to local communities, plus co-ordinated multiple other forms of assistance, from heavy equipment to food.
Woods wasn’t able to estimate the cost of the local response — aside from confirming it’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — but he said it will be covered by Emergency Management BC.
He also cautioned that once the response phase of the flood emergency ends, the recovery operation will begin and can be expected to last months as repairs and cleanup take place.
“Everyone can well imagine something’s going to have to happen to the sandbags out there,” said Woods.
“They have to go somewhere at some point, so we’ll want to work with the communities to come up with a co-ordinated effort to do that.”