Lake levels fluctuate on weekend
Down on Saturday, up on Sunday.
The level of Okanagan Lake bobbed around on the weekend, dropping seven millimetres but then rising four millimetres.
“I can look at the scunge line on my stairs and see that the lake level is changing a little bit,” Lynda Would, a West Kelowna waterfront property owner, said Sunday.
“But I’m not getting too excited about the changes,” she said. “What I’m more concerned about right now is the wind and wave action.”
At the advice of emergency officials, the Woulds, with the assistance of their neighbours, reinforced the wall of sandbags protecting their Casa Loma property.
“We’ve got three pumps going in our crawlspace,” Would said. “And the barrels are still on the wharf, even though it’s about 10 inches under water.”
On Sunday, the lake was measured at 343.248 metres above sea level, compared to 343.244 on Saturday. It was at 343.251 on Friday.
“The lakes are down ever so slightly, but one day certainly doesn’t make a trend,” Bruce Smith, information officer with the Central Okanagan emergency operations centre, said Saturday. “We can’t say that we’ve hit the peak or whether it’s going to go back up.
“We can’t say that it’s going down until we actually see that it’s going down consistently,” he added.
What happens next is highly dependent on the weather, said Smith.
“From what we understand, the rain is probably the biggest potential impact, in addition to wind,” he said. “Heavy rain could put quite a bit more water into the system . . . and we’ve all seen what happens with the wind in the last week or two, how damaging it can be with the high lake levels we’ve got.”
Residents are encouraged not to take the news of the lake level dropping as a sign to remove flood protection measures, said Smith.
“We encourage people to daily check their flood defences, and if they need to make repairs do so; if they need to bolster them up or fortify them, they should,” he said.
Smith cautioned: “Don’t get comfortable; stay on guard.”