Partially cleaned out bathroom from a home in Savona affected by Sunday's flash flooding/via Lorne Doerkson

Frustration is beginning to mount in the flood-hit community of Savona, as locals there continue to try to clean up.

A number of the 20 home owners who were flooded out over the Canada Day long-weekend have now discovered their insurance won’t cover overland flooding.

Thompson Nicola Regional District Director for the Savona area, Mike Grenier, says this is why they’ve applied for Disaster Financial Assistance from the province.

“After the 2021 flood event in Merritt, private property was eligible for DFA funding. After the 2023 flooding in Cache Creek, same thing. Some of these homes in Savona were impact to the same extent as these incidents,” argued Grenier.  “A disaster is a disaster. Whether it’s 20 homes, 200 homes or 2000. The people in Savona deserve equal treatment to the folks who have received DFA funding elsewhere.”

Grenier suggests there may be some level of provincial mismanagement of the drainage system under the TransCanada which led to part of the flooding.

“Residents along that street were trying to figure out why their basements were being flooded, why the water was pooling up around their property, only to discover that the culvert had actually been bolted shut,” noted Grenier. “Those two residents went down there and nearly got blown into the [Kamloops] Lake as they released the pressure.”

A small, but powerful storm cell settled over Savona on the Sunday before Canada Day, inundating the community with a vast amount of rain in a short time frame, flooding out 20 homes, three of which were determined at the time to be unlivable.