Cache Creek evacuees want to return home this weekend, but warm spell may dash their hopes

Anie Cruz Campbell operates a pizza restaurant and lives in a mobile home located at 1206 Highway 97 in Cache Creek, B.C. Unfortunately, the area was placed under an evacuation order last Wednesday due to flooding.

Now staying temporarily with her family in 16 Mile, north of Cache Creek, Campbell says she's worried she may not be allowed to reopen her business by this weekend.

"My property [is] on the side that's really damaged, so I don't know if they will let me open my business," she explained. "As a small business owner, we need to open. I have no income coming in, and I'm paying some bills, so I don't know how or what will happen if they will not let me open."

Campbell is among approximately 300 residents in Cache Creek — a town with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants situated about 72 kilometres west of Kamloops — who have been displaced by the rising waters of the Bonaparte River. The first evacuation order was issued on April 30.

The town is currently under a flood warning issued by the B.C. River Forecast Centre and a state of local emergency has been extended until May 13.

Under the B.C. River Forecast Centre's three-tiered warning system, a flood warning means flooding is imminent or already underway. A flood watch means river levels are rising, and flooding might occur.

Warm spell may lead to more evacuation orders

Last week, the flooding reached Cache Creek's firehall, causing damage to multiple homes and businesses. Highways 1 and 97 were also temporarily closed due to the rising waters.

As of Thursday, 300 people from 128 homes had been forced out, according to Wendy Coomber with the Cache Creek Emergency Operations Centre.

"The good news is that the evacuated properties are still mostly dry. The river levels are holding steady and actually they are showing a slight decline," she said. "But we have that hot weather forecasted for the weekend."

Provincial emergency officials noted that the amount of rain received in the southern Interior over the past weekend was less than expected, which provided a temporary stabilization of the flood risk. However, forecasters warn that the warm weather will likely accelerate snowmelt and pose further threats.

According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, temperatures in Cache Creek are expected to steadily rise throughout the week, reaching 29 C on Saturday and 34 C on Sunday.

The B.C. River Forecast Centre predicts that this warm spell will raise the freezing level, leading to the melting of mountain snowpacks and resulting in swollen waterways.

Cache Creek Mayor John Ranta describes the flooding in the town as the worst he has witnessed in 50 years, and he anticipates additional evacuation orders in the coming days as the rising temperatures affect the snowpack.

"The Bonaparte River was flowing at a 100-year level yesterday, and there is still an awful lot of snow up in the hills, and we are expecting 34-degree temperatures over the next couple of days," Ranta said on Wednesday.

He says the flooding has caused destruction to the community hall's parking lot and washed out sidewalks, acknowledging the growing frustration among local residents.

Residents' frustration with longer commute

Kathy Debert, a service counter representative at the Lordco store near Highway 1 in Cache Creek, says her own home, located on higher ground, remains unaffected. However, her colleagues' homes in the Sage and Sands Trailer Park have been under an evacuation order since Tuesday afternoon.

Debert says the Bonaparte River flooding has brought a lot of mud to the shop's parking lot, causing customers to experience longer wait times to enter the store.

"You get customers who are cranky because they had to wait 15, 20 minutes to get in, and now they can't figure out how they're going to get back out," she said. "The flaggers in town … I feel really sorry for them because you're getting cranky people who have to wait so long, and they're getting mad at flaggers."

Ranta notes that due to road damage caused by the flooding, a journey from his office to the post office, which used to take five minutes, now requires an hour of driving.

He empathizes with residents' feelings and believes that most of them are resilient.

"They recognize that it's not something that the village has done or failed to do. It's an act of God that is causing all this water to come down Cache Creek and the Bonaparte River, and we just have to manage the best that we can,'' he said.

Coomber, with the emergency operations centre, assures evacuees that their homes will remain secure while they are away. Many of them have been relocated to the emergency centre on Kamloops's McArthur Island.

"We've hired security for all of the evacuated areas, so there's round-the-clock security," she told host Shelley Joyce on CBC's Daybreak Kamloops. "Everything is sandbagged as well as we can."

She also said on Thursday that the village has applied to the province for disaster financial assistance for affected residents who have experienced flooding on their properties.

Meanwhile, Campbell expresses concerns about having to discard all the food left in the restaurant's fridge once she is permitted to return but says she, fortunately, managed to give away all the frozen pizza pies to a farm in Ashcroft for them to sell.