Regional District flood emergency response coming up on a month

PENTICTON – This year’s flood emergency is proving taxing to the regional district, who are more familiar with shorter duration, localized wild fire emergencies, says community services manager.

The regional district’s Emergency Operations Centre has been operating since May 4 and has been continuously active since that date.

Mark Woods says the present flooding emergency has resulted in 45 staff members contributing to the operation, generating up to 1,200 hours of overtime.

“The vastness of this flooding event is probably one of the more challenging aspects,” Woods says.

He says the Regional District’s traditional role in an emergency is to support incident command, but this time, incident command can be anyone from a local fire department to a group of residents. He says because of a lack of structure in some places, the District has had to take an operational role in assisting flood victims.

Woods says they have been supplying resources, especially sandbags, to affected areas with close to 500,000 sandbags distributed so far.

“Our role has been to coordinate the many events that have been taking place. I can’t say enough about the hard work being done at the community level, the local groups coming together to help people, from fire departments to regional district staff,” he says.

Woods says the district has supplied heavy equipment, engineers, vehicles and labour to affected areas, as well as shoring up public resources such as securing park benches from flooding.

Some of the biggest challenges to date are groundwater issues, occurring in places where creek beds are often dry for most of the year.

Woods says for the first time he’s heard of a target date of June 10 for peak water flow. After that, the District will begin working towards recovery, a process that can take two to three times as long as the emergency stage.

“One can imagine all those sandbags, they have to go somewhere at some point,” he says.

Woods says the District has handed out a large number of disaster assistance forms encouraging the public to download the information online.

West Bench director Michael Brydon noted the public’s confusion with local government’s role in flood mitigation, citing the municipal assistance recently provided to the Red Wing Resort community on Penticton Indian Band land. Woods said it was government’s role to offer support services, but not to sandbag private residences, where in most cases community groups come to their aid.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Steve Arstad or call 250-488-3065 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above.