The City of Kamloops will be going ahead with shoring up Riverside Park to protect from flooding.
Council has voted to have part of the Rivers Trail raised and to have rip rap rock installed along part of the riverbank.
Utility services manager Greg Wightman explains why the work is needed.
“We do have a lot of sanitary sewer main that runs throughout that park, a lot of man holes within that park. If any of those man holes were to become overwhelmed with flood water, the mains would become overwhelmed as well. They lead directly to the Riverside Lift Station, which is one of our major sewer stations in town.
“If that lift station were to become overwhelmed with flood waters, everything essentially east of Riverside Park would back up. It would be an enviromental disaster. And I can assure you the importance of protecting that infrastructure has been vetted by the province every time they give us the flood protection measures that we get, such as this year.”
The project will also see the width of the Rivers Trail tripled through the park, from one metre to three metres. The city says that improve safety, accessibility and overall enjoyment for people who use the park.
The work will cost $1.5 million. The city has an $800,000-dollar grant that it will be using, which is leftover from a bank stabilization project going under budget at Juniper Creek.
The city is also applying for another grant, worth $750,000, that would pay for the rest of it. That same grant request was denied last year, and if it were unsuccessful again then the city would use reserve funds for the project.
A start date for the work has not yet been determined.
Wightman says this project will protect against a “one-in-20-year” flood event. He says that’s a measurement of the water, pointing out we had a one-in-20-year flood event in 2012 and again this year, and that we were very close to that in both 2017 and 2018.
This summer, flood baskets stayed up at Riverside Park until late-July, because of an unusually-long spring snow melt which was followed by weeks of wet weather.