A plan to help with lowering flood risks in Courtenay will be going ahead.
The city announced on Friday that the mayor and council will be adopting the Flood Management Plan after it was presented to them at Wednesday’s council meeting.
The goal of this plan is to lower flood risk in the city by using general strategies such as Protect, Accommodate, Managed Retreat, Avoid, and Resilience Building. The strategies would focus on keeping water away using temporary barriers, accommodate the water’s movement and presence, moving infrastructure from hazard areas, limit development with a floodplain, and to prepare people to bounce back from a flood.
Principal and Founding engineer of Ebbwater Consulting Tamsin Lyle says the city has suffered flooding events in the past and remains at risk.
“Many rivers and creeks flow through Courtenay, the major ones being the Puntledge and Tsolum Rivers which join together to form the Courtenay River that flows into the estuary and Salish Sea,” said Lyle.
She says this geography can lead to three types of flooding for Courtenay; coastal flooding, which happens because of higher-than-normal water levels in the ocean, riverine flooding which comes after extreme rain creates water in a river to overflow, and pluvial flooding. Pluvial flooding happens when extreme rain can’t be accommodated by drainage systems.
For this plan, 86 actions are recommended to protect people from the dangers of flooding, with hopes of seeing them implemented for over the next 20 years.
With the plan adopted, the City adds they have directed staff to implement the actions, and to include budget for related projects in the five-year financial plan.
