Flood Plan Fails to Make the Grade
By 250 News
The red line shows the stretch of River Road which needed to be raised, but the project has not been approved.
There won’t be any raising of River Road to meet flood mitigation plans this year. The application was not approved.
The Province has announced it has allotted all the money it made available under the Urgent Flood Mitigation works program for this year. The Prince George proposal was not on the list of 87 projects approved to mitigate flood damage throughout the province .
Just shy of $33 million dollars had been set aside for projects to improve existing flood protection plans. The fund was announced at the end of March, and the City of Prince George submitted an application to raise River Road which is one of the designated dikes in the City.
City Engineer Dave Dyer says the proposal submitted called for a fairly aggressive completion schedule “The work had to be substantially completed by May 15th, and we were talking about 1.6 kilometres so we would have liked to have been able to start such a project in March, but that wasn’t the case.” Part of the problem with the selected project is that it also meant River Road would have to be re-paved, and that isn’t in the City’s budget, and would not have been covered under the government program.
Dyer says the announced funding had some special limitations, so projects that might be helpful in mitigating flood, wouldn’t necessarily qualify. “You couldn’t use the money for any new dikes, or to make repairs to old ones” says Dyer. “We just didn’t have any kind of project that was just sitting on the shelf that could be pulled down and fit the terms of the funding.”
One of the other projects which could help in the future, is the plan for the new pump station at the end of First Avenue, but again, it didn’t fit the terms of the special funding. “We have received funding in the past for the design of that project” says Dyer, but there is no funding on the immediate horizon to actually build that permanent pump station.
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Posted by: Gofaster on April 24 2007 2:30 PM
So what now? What are the City's plans for this part of town with respect to flood-proofing?
� What does the project look like?
� How much will it cost?
� What is the time schedule for getting it completed?
� Where would the dollars come from?
� Who will be protected?
� How much will the land value affected increase?
� How does this tie into getting access to the river for the people of Prince George for recreational, residential and appropriate commercial use for a modern city along its riverbanks?
Hopefully this "story" does not get lost in file 13.