Staff in the City of Merritt are keeping a close eye on the snowpack levels in the province as we head towards freshet season.

CAO Sean Smith says he knows residents are concerned, after the entire community of about 8,000 people had to be evacuated due to flooding in November.

“We’re absolutely being very very cautious in our approach to freshet this year,” he said.

“I can say that because of the temporary works that are in place for most of the lowest lying regions on the Coldwater River, we’re in a better spot coming into freshet than we’ve been historically, but that being said, we’re not taking anything for granted on that front.”

The BC River Forecast Centre says there is an elevated risk of spring flooding this year due to a higher than normal snowpack in parts of the province along with the possibility of cooler weather conditions.

As of March 1, it said the North Thompson snowpack was at 124 per cent of normal, the highest index since 1999, and second highest since 1977.

While the South Thompson snowpack was at normal levels at 102 per cent, the River Forecast Centre says there are only four sites reporting across the region.

“Since the South Thompson borders the North Thompson and Upper Columbia (which have significantly higher snow basin indices), it is possible that the snow pack is higher than the snow basin index suggests,” the RFC said.

The Nicola River snowpack – a sub-basin of the Lower Thompson (99 per cent), which itself is a sub-basin of Middle Fraser (111 per cent) – was sitting at 89 per cent as of March 1.

“The most likely cause for major flooding would be a period of persistent cool temperatures and wet weather into the late spring, followed by a sudden heat wave of at least five or more days,” the River Forecast Centre said. “There is evidence that 1948 and 1894 floods on the Fraser River were caused by this scenario.”

“Based on current snow stations that had measurements in 1948, the snow conditions for March 1 were considered average, showing the importance of spring weather to flooding. A secondary risky scenario is a widespread heavy rainfall event that occurs during the high flows from snowmelt.”

Smith says Merritt staff have been in contact with the province on a number of different mitigation strategies, including the deployment of sandbags, should there be the risk of flooding during freshet.

“If there is [another] one thing that we’ve talked about a whole lot with the province, it is about how we can improve for the future to make sure that we can as a city get as much notice as possible so that we can in turn provide you with as much notice as possible,” he said. “I will unequivocally say that we did the best that we could because of what we had for notice.”

“We are all very thankful that this situation wasn’t worse and really want to let residents know that we are working closely with the province to raise some of those concerns and address the bigger challenges about what can be done to make sure that that notice will happen earlier.”