Crews are working to clean up the Oak Dale Mobile Home Park in Westsyde.
(GLYNN BROTHEN / iNFOnews.ca)
July 03, 2015 - 4:30 PM
KAMLOOPS - The city applied to lengthen the state of emergency order on the Oak Dale trailer park area today, July 3, to give city workers more time to fix landscaping and drainage areas.
The city declared the order after flash flooding ran through the trailer park on June 30. The water, which cascaded from above Westsyde Road, damaged several mobile homes and carried mud throughout a portion of the park.
City CAO David Trawin says the order permits workers to go on private property for cleanup efforts, which could include creating new water channels and removing debris.
"The existing state of emergency was a week, however we’re going to need longer than that to fix drainage courses,” he says.
Trawin adds crews are still in ‘response mode’ as opposed to ‘recover mode’. He says if another huge rainfall happens in the area tonight, there would be further damage.
“We’re waiting on designs (for the drainage courses),” he says.
During ‘response mode’, provincial funding assists with 100 per cent on ‘a lot of the projects,' Trawin says. Once the state of emergency is rescinded, or back to ‘recover mode,' only up to 80 per cent of the costs can be recovered. Trawin says financial support can vary and is not ‘black and white’.
The city has rescinded an evacuation order and residents are permitted to return home, but Trawin says some trailers are still without power. Some homeowners opted to apply for a further 72-hour accomodation support today after a meeting with staff from the province’s disaster relief, he says.
Information on disaster relief assistance can be found here.
To contact a reporter for this story, email Glynn Brothen at gbrothen@infonews.ca, or call 250-319-7494. To contact the editor, email mjones@infonews.ca or call 250-718-2724.
News from © iNFOnews, 2015