The provincial government has come through with $750,000 in grant funding to put towards flood prevention at Riverside Park

That money will cover half of the $1.5-million Structural Flood Mitigation Project at the park in downtown Kamloops. Another $800,000 will be coming from leftover grant funding from a bank stabilization project at Juniper Creek that came in under budget.

The city of Kamloops says this new money will be used to protect Riverside Park from flooding, especially “critical sanitary sewer infrastructure” in the park. Its as the city has had to rely on temporary flood mitigation measures like HESCO flood barriers that were used in 2020.

“We’re trying to prevent that sanitary sewer system from becoming overwhelmed. There’s a pump station at Riverside Park where sewage from the east end of town flows through on route down to the sewage treatment centre,” Utility Services Manager, Greg Wightman told NL News.

“If the collection system within Riverside Park were to get overwhelmed with flood waters, it would then overwhelm that pump station and just continue to cause issues towards the east end of town there.”

Wightman says it costs a significant amount of money to install and remove temporary barriers as well as restoring the areas of the park once the barriers are taken down. It also leads to closure of large areas of the park and beach while the barriers are up.

“We know exactly the elevations where were need to take all the different actions that I’m sure folks have seen down at Riverside Park. Things like closing the path, and turning off the hydro, and deploying HESCO baskets if it does get that high,” added Wightman.

“We’ve never had the system become overwhelmed, but that’s just because of our planning that we put in place.”

There are plans to raise Rivers Trail to a higher elevation to reduce the need for those temporary flood protection measures. The City also intends to complete bank stabilization work near the pier to prevent erosion and damage to infrastructure during high water periods adding to temporary emergency work that was done in 2018.

“By raising Rivers Trail to a point where we’d be protected up to about a one-in-20 year flood level,” Wightman said.

“Just to put some context around that, had we had had this project in place last year when we had a severe freshet season, none of the HESCO baskets that were deployed throughout Riverside Park would have been required.”

Work at Riverside Park is expected to begin later this year, with more details to come when construction plans are finalized.