Kamloops city staff will be doing several garbage pickups along the Thompson River before high water fully arrives.

Speaking to city council, community and protective services director, Byron McCorkell, did not give specifics but says it will be similar to what staff did last spring shortly after the pandemic began.

He says support staff, bylaw officers, and contractors all took part in garbage pickups.

“We were hoping to do something maybe a little more public, but unfortunately with COVID-19 there’s difficulties in planning that. But our staff, we are looking to do much like what we did last March… So we’ll be doing a number of cleanups along the riverbank before high water,” McCorkell says.

Meanwhile, the river has risen by almost two feet in the past five days, according to a real-time measuring station just west of the Overlanders Bridge.

Many concerns have been raised in recent weeks about garbage on the riverbanks. Most of the problem areas involve garbage that has been left behind by squatters, as photos sent to NL News and posted to social media have shown.

Last month, area resident Joanne Hammond says she and her family cleaned up hundreds of pounds of trash from a 50-metre stretch of the riverbanks. She says as long as the city is going to allow people to camp along the river, they should be proactive about waste collection as there aren’t any trash cans in the area.

This past weekend, resident Sandy Seibel shared photos of a tent filled with needles and garbage that had been left on the riverfront for weeks, she says, which she and another patron cleaned up. She adds there were an estimated 150 needles in the tent.

“How is that not an emergency on a public beach at a park where people have their dogs and kids… When is something going to be done about this?”

(Photo: Facebook: Sandy Seibel)