Those in Sayward are keeping a close eye on nearby waterways as the atmospheric river sweeps through a region that has recently seen four feet or 120 centimetres of snow.
Flooding is a concern but so far temperatures have remained low.
“If the rain persists like this and the snowmelt with the amount of snow we have here it could be quite interesting,” said Terry McClung, who went to where the White and Salmon Rivers meet to gauge their levels.
A family member lives on a nearby property but the river is still relatively low.
“It’s not bad right now. It still has four or five feet to come up before it starts flooding their property,” said McClung.
It started snowing on Christmas in Sayward and over a metre fell over the following week — an amount of old-timers say they haven’t seen in possibly 50 years. Last week people were shovelling off roofs concerned some roofs could cave in. Today you can see some structures did collapse.
“A couple of my neighbours had cracks appearing in their ceiling and one guy’s deck had a lot of warping of the supporting posts,” said David Malinski, a Sayward resident.
A huge community effort that saw neighbours helping neighbours minimized the damage.
But now the rain has arrived and though a real concern flooding hasn’t been reported to the village yet. A village representative says, fortunately, the weather conditions have been favourable since the snow fell.
“Temperatures have been fairly low, one or two degrees, so the melt is happening slowly which is good,” said Lisa Clark with the Village of Sayward.
This Sayward newcomer took possession of the former cable cafe just two weeks ago. Encased with logging cable it wasn’t engineered for all the snow. It nearly collapsed.
“The amazing thing to counter that though was the community. Sayward Future Society has sent people to help me. There have been volunteers…” said the newcomer who goes by Honey Badger.
They ended up jacking up the roof five inches and putting in some extra supports to save it. The new owner has plans to reopen it this summer. There are now some leaks but that’s a smaller obstacle.
Kendall Hanson
