The Williams Lake First Nation activated their Emergency Operations Centre to Level 1 this past Friday night.
EOC Director Aaron Mannella explained why.
“We’ve had freezing at night and some pretty tremendous thaws during the day. Friday we had some pretty wild weather, ups, and downs, with the rain that occurred, and I think we had double-digit positive temperatures. So we had a significant amount of runoff and flooding that was beginning to happen in the community of Sugar Cane, on what we call Indian Reserve number one or IR #1” Manella said, “So we activated our EOC to level 1 and in partnership with EMBC and our own EOC staff we endeavored over the weekend to stave off some drainage issues and also start to prepare for the worse by assembling over 11-hundred sandbags.”
Mannella said they received help from Central Cariboo Search and Rescue who sent 8 members to assemble the sandbags in response to this early flooding/freshet activity in the community of Sugar Cane.
“Search and Rescue can be sort of delegated by EMBC although it doesn’t happen very often. Typically we would receive Wildfire Firefighters as a support but they weren’t available”. Mannella said, “So the good folks at Search and Rescue were absolutely phenomenal assisting with assembling the sandbags, it was just tremendous”.
Mannella added right now their Emergency Operations Centre continues to be at level 1 monitoring a number of locations and he anticipates that they will see some pretty heavy flooding and freshet events in the coming days and weeks.