Kelowna Mayor fields questions about flood fight

Kelowna’s mayor, Colin Basran, is taking to youtube to talk about the city’s flood fight.

“Many of you have a lot of questions as to how this situation has come to be,” Basran said in video released Wednesday. “As the flooding has got more serious, a lot of you have been asking how we got into this situation.”

A series of videos are now up on the city’s youtube page to “provide information about the current situation about what we can expect in the days and weeks ahead,” Basran said.

The latest video touches on the impact of weather on flooding. In March and April Kelowna had one and a half times the amount of rain fall than average, creating the fourth wettest spring on record according Cindy Yu with Environment Canada.

As for summer, Yu said a “drier, warmer pattern is on the way.”

The video also discusses the impact of the snow pack and spring runoff. Dave Campbell with the River Forecast Centre said snow levels were about one-and-a-half times the norm in April.

“I think the key thing is these are pretty exceptional conditions and circumstances and they’re not ones we’ve had a huge lead time in terms of assessing or getting a handle on,” Campbell said. “That transition from things looking fairly reasonable to being quite extreme happened over a fairly short period.”

Basran also spoke with Shaun Reimer who works for the province’s natural resource operations department, primarily at the Okanagan Dam in Penticton.

There have been questions about why water wasn’t released at Okanagan Dam sooner and what more could have been done.

“When we get these extreme conditions like we’ve seen this year, it’s almost impossible to be able to plan for that or to manage the lake for that,” Reimer responded.

“It’s a complex problem,” emergency operations deputy director Ron Mattiussi said. “Mother nature can wreak havoc…and sometimes we just have to accept as humans there’s so only so much we can do.”