Re: Does large snow pack = flood risk?

As the article mentions, there are a number of variables that determine if flooding will happen on local creeks.  In the case of Mission Creek, things are changing and one variable is being seriously overlooked.  Think of Mission Creek as that drain pipe on your house that is full of leaves. 

The more leaves that go into the drain pipe, the less capacity it has to carry water and the more likely it is to overflow even with small amounts of water.  Unless you clean out that drain pipe, it eventually has zero capacity and just overflows all the time.

Mission Creek is becoming plugged full of gravel and it takes less run-off to produce a flood. Just have a look at the gravel bar under the KLO Bridge which is double the size of the gravel bar from the previous year.  Past Provincial governments and local officials understood past flooding issues and used to removed extensive amounts of gravel from Mission Creek.

But at the moment it seems everyone is ignoring this problem because of ignorance or to save money.  But just like the drain pipe on your house, you can only ignore it for so long before you have a lot of water damage.

Ron McMillan