Bill For Battling Flood Yet Not Yet Known

By 250 News

The City of Prince George doesn’t know yet just how high the bill will be for all the work that was done during last week’s Fraser River flood.

Don Schaffer is the Information Officer for the City and  while he isn't willing to  even try to give  a ballpark figure for the cost of  dealing with the flood, he says Prince George will be looking for some financial assistance from the Province to cover the costs.

“The City will be taking into account whatever is available to us to apply for from the Province.  We have a number of people who have been keeping track of all the activities the City has taken during the emergency situation that we had, and we will submit all sorts of different forms and bills and reconciliation and be reimbursed.”

Schaffer says  he has no idea  how much the bill might be, but  says he would assume the City will not be sitting on its hands “We’re going to try and make sure we’ve got everything accounted for so  we can receive whatever funding we are entitled to  from the province in as timely a fashion as possible.”

Schaffer is aware  some of the residents of Farrell Street would like to see more diking, or rip-rap  along the bank to prevent this kind of flooding in the future “Putting rip-rap into a fish bearing  stream is not a simple matter  as you would imagine.  There’s also an issue of raising the bank, creating a  berm,  that’s an engineering project  as opposed to backing up a truck and tossing  in some rocks,  it simply is not that easy.”

Now that the river is receding, the Emergency Operations Centre will take time to assess what it did right during the emergency and what needs to be improved.  “There’s always a debriefing, we are going to do that internally and we will undertake a debriefing with the Provincial –Regional Emergency Operations Centre.   We’ll very   likely talk about response times, actions, efficiencies and effectiveness of those undertakings.”

Schaffer says  no one is perfect “I think we  did well, all things considered, and  I think that we need to look at what we didn’t do well and learn from that, and  improve on it.”

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