Two years after devastating flooding ravaged the community, a Merritt city official says future flood mitigation work has all but come to a standstill.
Sean Strang, Merritt’s director of recovery and mitigation, said city council approved a flood mitigation plan in November of 2022 after funding its development with provincial grant money.
“They said at the time that that plan should include what they call managed retreat, or looking at removing some properties from flood risk, and then building out dikes and protections for the rest of the properties,” he said.
According to Strang, the city has identified 32 properties for full or partial buyouts where a new flood mitigation system would be installed.
After taking the plan back to the province, Strang said they were told no funding could be allocated to complete the flood mitigation work.
“So we've kind of been stuck in this weird zone, where they've even said, ‘Hey, we'll give you a bunch of money for the actual construction of the dikes and the earthwork, but no money for the actual purchase of the property to put on the dikes on top,’” he said.
“It's fairly frustrating to say the least.”
Strang said some sections of a dike will be constructed next year on property owned by the municipality, but it may be useless unless the entire system can be completed, which would require purchasing the property.
“At the core is how do you buy a property? What's the valuation method? How do you make sure it's equitable, et cetera, and B.C. has just not put forward a policy on that one,” he said.
Strang said there’s been almost no time in B.C. history where river flow has exceeded mitigation infrastructure standards to the extent it did during the 2021 floods, and never in a residential area.
He said previous infrastructure is now essentially useless, built only to withstand 150 cubic metres of water impact per second.
During the floods, 320 cubic metres per second of water was recorded, and new infrastructure will be built to withstand 490 cubic metres of water per second.
According to Strang, there are currently 1,274 properties in the inundation zone, or the number of properties that would be expected to flood in the case of a one-in-200-year flood event.
“We’re talking about huge numbers that nobody in B.C. has dealt with before, which is why we're saying, ‘Hey, this is important,’” he said.
“We realize that’s a lot of money, but Merritt is unable to fund this and we need the province to step forward and work with us with what they've asked us to do.”
Strang said the 2021 flood affected about 640 properties, and 30 to 40 single-family homes or apartments haven’t been rebuilt at this point.
Despite future mitigation working sitting in Limbo, Strang said there’s been plenty of wins on the recovery side.
“We’ve had almost $20 million of infrastructure projects, plus the school division has had a bunch. We've had tracks, rebuilt roads, repaved, et cetera, there's been a lot of work in the last two years in recovery,” said Strang.
“I have 53 individual recovery projects, everything from getting rid of danger trees to moving the dog park to rebuilding a 12 plus million dollar bridge that we're working on right now. So there has been a lot of wins.”
