The City of Williams Lake is seeing improvements in its efforts to reduce water levels at the site of a beaver dam high above Juniper Street.
“The siphoning activities through the weekend kept working very well,” Gary Muraca, Chief Administrative Officer said, “We managed to drain the pond down a foot and half to two feet so we’re going to continue that process, monitoring it to make sure the siphoning is performing. Then we’ll be reaching out to the province, because it is crown land, requesting once the Emergency phase is done what their plans are going forward for the recovery phase, so how are we going to prevent this from happening again.”
Muraca added that they went down to one siphon because we found that we were potentially overwhelming the system downstream at the Juniper end so we did some cleanup of the ditch line in the culverts.
“Today we installed a second culvert so we could double the capacity for draining so we hope to get up to 22-hundred liters per minute coming out of those siphons by midday if it hasn’t happened already and be hopefully in a position where the risk is completely eliminated by mid-week” Muraca said.
On June 2, 2022, the City of Williams Lake activated its Emergency Operations Centre at Level 1 (low risk) in response to an increased water load at the historic beaver dam site.
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