The Head of the BC River Forecast Centre says he is cautiously optimistic when it comes to the current flooding outlook for our region.
Dave Campbell says that things have cooled off the last few days and that they have seen an easing of flows in many of the areas in the Cariboo, Nazko, and Bonaparte that had high flow conditions late last weekend.
He adds however that he would still not characterize the situation as stable yet.
“We’re in a bit of a holding pattern with less extreme warm temperatures then we saw last week and gradual warming through this week. As we get into next week some of the potential for that longer period of warm weather is there and also we may see some rainy weather. That could potentially be a combination where we see increased pressure on a lot of the rivers.”
A third to half of the snow at mid-elevation that has caused the issues up until now has melted within the last 7 to 10 days according to Campbell noting that the Centre will be releasing the data from their May 1st Snow Bulletin sometime next week.
“Coming into the season we did do analyze looking at specifically where those fire areas were and what the contributions might be to some of those major flows. Areas that we’re seeing flooding right now are in some of those areas that had high burn severity within them particularity in the Nazko/West Rd River was heavily burned last year, and areas in the Bonaparte River,” says Campbell.
“Another area was the Chilcotin River-at this point the Chilcotin has not really gotten into the melt yet but I think the concerns would be there as well because of the severity.”
“We don’t anticipate it’s at a scale where it would impact the bigger rivers like the Fraser River even though there are areas of the Fraser that have been burned.”
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