By Sebastian Kanally, Times Chronicle
Oliver’s work to mitigate the risk of flooding around Wolfcub Creek has become more complicated and requires more money.
The town hired TRUE Engineering to do the design work around the creek after receiving approval for a $45,000 disaster risk reduction grant from the BC Union of Municipalities (UBCM) on January 25, 2024.
In May of 2023, were overwhelmed with water, resulting in multiple yards flooding, at least one basement flooding, and damage to culverts.
Adam Goodwin, Oliver’s emergency program coordinator, explained to council that TRUE Engineering approached staff last week and informed them that they are experiencing difficulty mitigating risk with the existing infrastructure.
After their initial design work for new culverts and other mitigation efforts, they discovered that “additional assessments and design work needs to take place above what was originally included in the scope of the work”.
TRUE needs to look at more innovative options to conduct the work required to build the infrastructure up to the minimum recommendations, which has to be up to the 200-year flood level. Different options such as dedicated underground rainwater pipelines are not possible at the moment due to size constraints including existing roadways and property lines.
“We anticipated some challenges, but probably not the level of challenges they have found through this phase of work”, Goodwin noted to council during their March 11 meeting.
Council approved applying for up to $150,000 under the climate adaptation stream so that they can continue the work to look at all alternatives to mitigate the flood risk along Wolfcub Creek.
Goodwin explained that the town has already been in discussions with UBCM, and they would consider the increase in work to be an additional phase of work requiring a new application for the grant.
This means they would not have to amend their current agreement, and would therefore be seeking $150,000 instead of the $45,000 already received for the planning and design work to mitigate disaster risk around the creek. The deadline for the grant is the end of March 2024.
The project is 100 per cent funded by UBCM, but is currently only for the design work. Goodwin further explained that UBCM and the province will fund up to $5 million, 100 per cent funded, to implement whatever option the community decides to move forward with.
