Flood costs amount to millions of dollars
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Daily Courier is counting down the year’s biggest stories in the Central Okanagan, as chosen by the editorial department.
Asudden surge in the flow of Mill Creek on the night of May 4 signalled the start of unprecedented flooding in Kelowna.
For five weeks, steadily rising lake levels subsumed entire beaches, damaged dozens of parks, destroyed hundreds of docks and resulted in cleanup costs approaching $20 million for the municipalities of Kelowna, West Kelowna and Lake Country.
In addition, hundreds of Central Okanagan homeowners had to deal with messy and costly flood damage to their homes and properties.
“The water in my house was up to my armpit, and my washer and dryer were floating,” Bruce Lovell recalled a few days after his home on Marshall Street was swamped by the Mill Creek flooding.
When the creek burst its banks, more than 100 Kelowna homes were evacuated.
Within days, however, as warm weather accelerated the melting of a deeper-than-usual mountain snowpack, a much larger concern became the prospect of widespread flooding along Okanagan Lake.
“This is the first time to my knowledge that we’ve ever had an evacuation alert because of concerns about lake flooding,” said Dorothy Zoellner, whose family has owned property on Bluebird Road since 1943. “I’m very nervous.”
From mid-May until early June, there was a military-style effort to defend shoreline properties.
With the help of provincial firefighters, more than two million sandbags were deployed along the shore of Okanagan Lake in the Central Okanagan, forming flood defences that stretched nearly 40 kilometres in length.
Nevertheless, on June 5, local officials released flood projection maps that showed large areas of the downtown waterfront were at risk, including all of City Park, Manhattan Point, and large parts of Stuart Park and Waterfront Park.
“It’s pretty scary,” Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran said on June 5. “But we’re pretty fortunate so far that the protection that’s put in place is doing its job.”
Public boat launches were closed, both because they were unusable with the high water levels and because there were fears wakes from powerboats might exacerbate beachfront erosion.
Just as it seemed many low-lying areas might be inundated, the level of Okanagan Lake peaked on June 8 at 343.25 metres above sea level, an all-time high.
Some residents believe provincial officials are at least partly responsible for the flooding for not widening the release gate at the Penticton dam earlier in the spring to draw down the lake level.
Earlier this month, the NDP government announced former Liberal MLA George Abbott and Indigenous leader Maureen Chapman will head an independent review of the province’s response to this year’s wildfire and flood disasters.
“We can take their findings and apply them to the upcoming fire season and flood season to make sure we’re as prepared as we can be,” Premier John Horgan said.