Brian O’Rourke has seen flood waters creep into the basement headquarters of the United Steelworkers Local 1-2017 in downtown Prince George but never as bad as what he saw during Tuesday’s intense rainstorm.
The thunderstorm that rolled through the city at about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday brought sheets of rain that dumped for nearly a full half-hour and turned city streets into lakes, causing localized flooding that damaged some buildings.
A river of water and mud poured in from the parking lot storm drain under the door into the building on Third Avenue and had nowhere to go but the office space where O’Rourke and his staff conduct their business. The elevator shaft took on enough water that it had to be shut down. A crew from Acme Janitorial spent the night pumping tankloads of water into a truck that had to be dumped several times. Some boxes of files took on water but staff had time to get most valuable items off the ground once the water started coming in.
“We’ve had similar incidents where the water would come in just inside the glass doors but this one yesterday, for whatever reason, it was just nuts,” said O’Rourke, the USW Local 1-2017 president.
“We’ve never had water like this. It just couldn’t take it way fast enough and it all bubbled up. A lot of places around town got hit, especially in this area. Some parts of the city it didn’t even rain.”
The storm completely missed the Hart and College Heights area and parts of the Bowl, but there was enough water pooling to bring out some kayakers for a little unexpected paddle time around the Fifth and Tabor intersection.
Some of the worst flooding was in the light industrial area around Queensway. RCMP officers were called in to assist stranded motorists and sections of First, Second and Third Avenues were closed temporarily until the flood waters subsided.
A section of pavement that butts into the KMS Tools building at 101 Queensway collapsed under the weight of the water and left long deep hole where it drained under the building. The loading bay at the back of the building was surrounded by a puddle 18 inches deep.
“I’ve never seen a storm like that, just the amount of rain in a period of short time, said KMS Tools store manager Mike Hornsberger. “I’ve seen showers like that for five minutes, not 20 or 30 minutes. It was centrally located in about a five-block radius of here.”
Hornsberger said the building is built on a flood plain and sits on pillars so there was no structural damage other than that one section of the pavement.
“With that much water coming down you always have damage,” he said. “Water comes under these buildings all the time, it just found a weak spot there and it was like a drain, so everything slumped in. Queensway was completely under water.”
The city’s storm sewer system was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of rain but it did its job. Aside from some pavement damage that left a large pothole around a storm drain on Winnipeg Street at the 15th Avenue overpass, city streets and sidewalks were left relatively unscathed. Road crews had all lanes of the road open by the early afternoon.
“It was a lot of water very fast and you don’t really build storm systems for the once a year when you get a half an hour of rain,” City of Prince George communications manager Julie Rogers said. “It’s not unusual to have a flash flood. Our storm system struggled to keep up but once the rain slowed down the water drained away. Within an hour of the rain slowing down things pretty much cleared up.”
