More than 12 mm of rain fell in just 45 minutes on Monday, trigging flash floods throughout Penticton, B.C.
The Emergency Operations Centre received 86 reports of properties damaged by flooding across the community.
“Usually, the rain falls over a longer period of time and our infrastructure can handle that and deal with the rain flow events. But once it all happens at once, then you get the block-ups and debris and all those sorts of things so it’s quite unique,” said Emergency Operations Centre director Anthony Haddad.
Haddad said the damage is widespread throughout the community, impacting a range of businesses and family homes.
“Some larger complexes in terms of basement flooding, lower-level parking lot floodings, so it’s a range of different properties spread out throughout the community,” said Haddad.
The city declared a local state of emergency on Monday to allow emergency crews to access private properties.
“We had approximately 50 staff out in the field dealing with the responses to the issues made up of our fire department, building engineering staff and public works staff,” said Haddad.
“We had our eight rapid response teams in the field as well and they were visiting the individual properties that called in with their concerns around the flooding event from yesterday.”
Crews returned to the 86 properties and stormwater infrastructure on Tuesday to assess damages and cleanup. The severity of all the damage is unknown at this time.
More severe weather is in the forecast for Wednesday and Thursday and the Emergency Operations Centre said they will be monitoring weather patterns over the next couple of days.
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