With all the talk of the summer wildfires, people seemed to forget about the flooding along the Okanagan, Kettle and Fraser Rivers earlier this year.

That’s according to Environment Canada’s Senior Meteorologist David Phillips.

They listed the flooding in southern BC as their sixth top weather story of 2018.

He says we had a good amount of snow in the mountains this past winter, before some record high spring temperatures.

“You want it to sort of melt during the day, and freeze at night,” he said. “It was round the clock melting going on.”

“Someone called it a “shock melt”. It was melting in the valley bottom and the alpine peaks at the same time. So you had a lot of the melt-water appearing in the river.”

Phillips added the melt overwhelmed the rivers.

“What we saw in the Fraser, in the Kettle, and in the Okanagan River was flooding that rivalled the 1940 floods,” added Phillips.

Our soldiers came out, they were back in three months to fight fires. It was “feast or famine” in parts of British Columbia.”

Nearly 5,000 residents were evacuated and another 7,000 were on standby alert, with many states of emergency across the interior.