High streamflow advisories have been called off today for a number of tributaries west of Kamloops.
Those include the Bonaparte River, Deadman River, Guichon Creek and other creeks and streams around Cache Creek, Ashcroft and Logan Lake.
BC River Forecast Centre hydrologist Jonathan Boyd says snow from low-to-mid elevations flows into the Bonaparte River, and says that river and other streams around Cache Creek have already peaked for the season, pending any significant rainfall over the next few weeks.
“The real reason is we had the tremendously warm temperatures in the middle of April. And there were many parts of the province that experienced all-time record maximum temperatures for about a four-day period in mid April. And that really wiped out a lot of the snow at lower and mid elevations,” Boyd says.
“For the higher-elevation areas like the South Thompson and North Thompson, we still aren’t even close to reaching the peaks for the season yet.”
As of May 1, the snowpack for the North Thompson was “normal,” Boyd says, at one per cent below normal, and the South Thompson was 20 per cent below normal. Boyd says the South Thompson watershed can be “a little tricky” to record data because there are fewer monitoring stations, and he suspected that the snowpack as of May 1 was actually only five-to-10 per cent below normal.
Meanwhile, this is the first time in several years the Cache Creek area has seen an increased flood risk during the spring freshet. Last year, more than 150 homes along the Bonaparte River were put on evacuation alert three times between April and July, and almost a dozen homes along Cache Creek itself were evacuated in late-April last year.
The province continues to ask people to steer clear of fast-flowing rivers during the spring freshet, also saying riverbanks can potentially be unstable at this time of year from high water.