Pandosy flooded in 1948
Longtime Kelowna residents recall flooding crisis that struck city 69 years ago
Ron Gee remembers flooding in June 1948 like it happened yesterday. “I went out in the truck in the morning to deliver bread all over town and when I came back to the bakery it was flooded,” said Gee, 88.
“The brick oven had split in half from the cold water hitting the hot oven and cracking it wide open.”
At the time, Gee had just turned 19 and graduated from Kelowna Secondary School.
He’d recently bought into his father Jack’s business, Home Bakery, located at the corner of Ethel Street and Burne Avenue.
“Mill Creek lapped right up against the back of the property all the time,” said Gee.
“But Mill Creek is crazy, and when the waters got high, like they really did in 1948, it flooded all over the place.”
Gee and his dad immediately went to work mopping the place up. They hired a bricklayer to repair the brick oven so Home Bakery could be back in business five days later.
Gee remembers the City of Kelowna doing extensive work along Mill Creek after that flood in hopes there wouldn’t be a repeat.
But the creek has spilled its banks several times since, when spring conditions of warm weather, heavy snowmelt and excessive rain combined to swell creeks and Okanagan Lake. Flooding has occurred in 1954, 1990 and 1997.
As this spring’s rising level of Okanagan Lake is being measured against the record high waters of 1948, The Daily Courier went to work to find some oldtimers who remembered the crisis 69 years ago.
The natural person to start with was Al Blanke, 84, who sent the newspaper a photo of him and his dad, Rudy, in a rowboat in front of 2915 South Pandosy St., assessing flood damage.
“My dad was the Rudy in Rudy’s Shoe Repair, and he had just moved his business into that building and hadn’t even had his first day open there yet,” recalled Blanke, who was 15 at the time.
“The picture was taken with a Brownie 120 box camera by either my mom, Helen, or my sister, who we called Toots.”
Blanke said the flooding depicted in the photo wasn’t even the worst of it.
“What you see in that photo is water that wasn’t too deep,” he said.
“But a little later it was flowing, covering all of Pandosy Street. We heard on CKOV (radio) that the water was so high the KLO Bridge was going to break. So, me and a bunch of my friends hopped on our bikes and rode over there to see it groan and snap and be swept away down the street until it crashed into Mission Creek.”
We also contacted Dorothy Zoellner, with the Okanagan Historical Society, who is a frequent contributor to this newspaper, for 1948 flood recollections.
Zoellner, however, had moved to Vancouver by the summer of 1948 to attend university, so she had no first-hand experience with the flood.
She recommended I speak with her friend Lorraine McLarty, who had stayed on to take Grade 13 in Kelowna.
However, McLarty lived on higher ground in Rutland and wasn’t impacted by the flooding.
McLarty suggested talking to Ron Gee, from her graduating class.
It’s been a flooding full circle for Gee.
For the past 31 years, he’s lived at Imperial Apartments, the sixstorey complex at 4058 Lakeshore Rd. that fronts Okanagan Lake.
“I live on the ground floor here, so I’m just about flooded again,” said Gee.
“Luckily, when they built this place 50-some-odd years ago, they built it up a bit from the beach. But the water right now is almost up to the beach entrance of the building, and it’s been sandbagged and the pump is going full time.”
Charlie Adam was 15 and living at the corner of Rose Avenue and Speer Street, near Kelowna General Hospital, at the time of the 1948 flood.
“We were far enough away from both Mill Creek and Okanagan Lake that the water didn’t quite get to us,” he said.
“But I remember helping with some sandbagging and that people on Abbott Street had to put planks up on bricks so they could get to their houses. But it wasn’t too deep. We could ride our bikes through it no problem.”