'Braced for anything'

Photo: Darren Handschuh

"We have braced ourselves for pretty much anything at this point," said a hopeful Lumby Mayor Kevin Acton.

With large floods occurring in the South Okanagan and many more in the Central Okanagan, the North Okanagan has been pretty lucky this spring, so far.

A special weather statement has been issued for Friday, calling for thunderstorms which could result in 20 to 40mm of rain, but communities around Vernon don't think it will cause a significant impact.

"With the heat that we have right now, we are getting a lot of melt," Acton said. "Some of the fields on the west part of town are definitely flooded to points where if we hadn't had earthworks in place from last year properties would certainly be flooding."

Village crews continue to work hard prepping for floods, Acton added, flooding season isn't over yet, anything could happen.

"If everything holds tight that little bit of extra rain probably won't have a huge effect on us," he said.  "If you think about the fact that we have had some high winds with warm weather that's kind of taken some off in the way of evaporation."

If it wasn't for Mother Nature working in the North Okanagan's favour things could have been a lot worse.

"We've not really had the rain that we had last year," Acton said. "I know people have been working diligently at protecting their property."

As for the City of Armstrong their local state of emergency has ended, for now.

Last year, many Armstrong residents were the victims of serious flooding, specifically the properties near Meighan Creek.

"I hope we don't get any rain," said Armstrong Mayor Chris Pieper. "Things are calm right now so as long as we don't get any big rain storms we will be ok."

If 20 to 40mm of rain does hit Armstrong the outcome could mean serious flooding.

"We could have some intermittent flooding but we are optimistic we could coast through any small rainfalls," Pieper said.

Almost all the snow has melted off the Meighan Creek watershed.

"If we get two or three days of rain or torrential rain then we could have short-term flooding but  the creeks are at a pretty good level right now."