While Kamloops saw some localized flooding due to last night’s thunderstorm, the City of Merritt took a much worse hit.

Environment Canada says 23 mm of rain fell in the Merritt area, but Acting CAO Greg Lowis says their infrastructure was able to cope.

“Where there is that much water that comes out of the sky very rapidly, it does take time for it to pool through our storm drain system and get sucked out,” he said.

“I was driving around Merritt at about 4 o’clock so I know that say the intersection at Houston and Garcia that had a substantial amount of water at that point. My understanding is that most of the intersections and the low-lying roads in the city had drained out by 5:30, 6 o’clock.”

In a tweet at 4:30 p.m. yesterday, the City of Merritt asked people to avoid driving or walking through puddles as it was difficult to determine the potential danger.

“I know that there were some other areas of Merritt that were hit. I’ve spoken to people who were south of the City near the Coldwater River. I’ve spoken to people who are in the Collettville area,” Lowis said.

“Yes, there were a lot of our streets which briefly would have looked like it had large amount of water on it, because it did, as it was in the process of percolating through to our storm water infrastructure.”

Speaking to NL News, Lowis says the storm was traumatic for some Merrittonians because of the major flooding last November.

“For a lot of our residents it is traumatic to see roads with a substantial amount of water and again, I think everyone’s mind went straight back to November, but this was a very different type of incident,” he said.

“Back in November, we had a very long period of sustained rainfall over a wide area and that was all having to wash through Merritt in order to get out. This time we’d had a much shorter period of time. The water was just landing on Merritt itself going through our storm systems.”

Lowis says there were a number of people’s basements that flooded, and so he’s encouraging homeowners to speak to their insurance providers

“We are having a lot of people contacting city hall and expressing their concerns, their fears. We are of course very cognizant of the flooding issues,” he said.

“Any information that we get about how the city responds to water events is always useful and we will look at what what we can do with that even if we can’t immediately respond to things.”