Merritt residents wake up to flooding, don’t know when they can return

MERRITT, B.C. — A mobile home could be seen floating down the Coldwater River in Merritt on Monday morning (Nov. 15).

The Coldwater River broke its banks overnight, flooding streets downtown and people’s homes.

“About one in the morning actually. My mom came downstairs, woke me up in my suite and said: ‘we were flooding’,” Merritt resident Holden King says. “I saw nothing at about six in the morning, then came outside and the water started pouring in, started filling the basement up.”

Holden and 7,200 other Merritt residents were forced to evacuate starting at 10 in the morning. RCMP went door to door and told people to leave town and either head to Kamloops or Kelowna.

People took whatever they could grab on their way out of town.

“We got the kids out of there right away, and now we’re just coming back to pick up what we can,” Merritt resident Shannon Varley says. “But we don’t have access to the house anymore, so we had to get whatever we could get right now.”

The evacuation order was not primarily due to the flood damage. Merritt’s wastewater treatment plant was compromised and deemed inoperable.

“The flood event is an ongoing situation and we’ve lost all capacity to process wastewater in the city,” Emergency Operations Centre Information Officer Greg Lowis says. “As a result, it is no longer safe for residents to remain in Merritt, and so we’ve issued an evacuation order.”

The City of Merritt does not know the extent of the damage at the treatment plan, nor when it will be safe to allow residents back home.

“We know that our wastewater treatment plant has been lost at this point. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to bring it back online in days or however long it will take,” Lowis notes. “It’s entirely up to the weather, the water, and when we get back in there how much damage has been done.”

City staff say they had been monitoring the weather, knowing a rain event was coming, but couldn’t have predicted this.

Meanwhile, residents are out of their homes for an indeterminate amount of time, and for the some 2,000 homes with damage, the uncertainty is even greater.

“Lots of damage. All the floors will have to come out, the drywall. They’ll need a new furnace,” King says.