Merritt’s flood recovery takes step forward with first new dike section underway

It was a day of celebration and forward progress for the city of Merritt on Monday (July 29), in their long rebuild from the devastating 2021 floods.

City representatives and community members gathered to see the first steel girders span the Coldwater River where the Middlesboro Bridge rebuild is underway. Dike work also began along a stretch of the river closest to the public works yard.

The Middlesboro Bridge was destroyed in the 2021 atmospheric river, and its continued absence in the community has been noted as one of the last remaining public scars of that devastating flood in Merritt.

“That bridge is the last piece, so we can kind of put recovery behind us and look to the future and to mitigation. What do we do to prevent this from happening again rather than how do we recover from the last one? I think that is a really good corner to turn for myself, my team and our community,” said Sean Strang, Director of Flood Recovery and Mitigation.

“The healing will have started but there will always be the memory of what happened. No matter how big this bridge is, or how new it looks and how fantastic it is, there will always be a reminder of that day. But yes it will heal the community it will take away the visual reminder of what we lost,” added Mayor Mike Goetz.

While the bridge’s progress serves as a symbolic measure, the dike work beginning helps protect the community that leaders have stressed will flood again without proper dike improvements.

“This is actually the first new diking section that is going in. So again super exciting from a regulatory standpoint, it’s about 300 metres of diking, overall there is about 5 kilometres of diking, so this is a long road ahead of us,” said Strang. “I don’t want to be George Bush waving a mission accomplished banner here to preemptively. But it’s a really big step forward.”

While the city would love to work through the diking plan on the highest-risk priority basis, challenges with acquiring properties alongside the river have complicated efforts.

“Basically that is the one element that we are missing. We have come up with a bunch of funding and a bunch of financing for building the dikes but we need funding from the province to actually buy a couple of properties along it to locate the dikes. So, all we can build at this point is places where we have access to the property, own the property or can come to some sort of agreement. Not necessarily the highest risk,” said Strang.

The city is working with the province to secure the needed land to complete the dike work.