I'm not sure how much the average Prince George resident knows about how hydrology works but I would assume that the engineering staff at City Hall know all about it.
The problem is that even with this knowledge, they want to spend three to five million dollars of taxpayers money to build a dike on River Road that will do nothing to protect local businesses
in the area.
During the ice jam, local businesses had their properties flooded not by water coming over the banks, but by ground water that was pushed up by hydraulic
pressure.
No dike will ever protect against that, unless it extends all the way down to bedrock and sealed at the interface. The best way to mitigate the flooding problem that we have is to reinitiate dredging at the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser rivers so water and ice has somewhere to go.
If I'm not mistaken, there was a gravel claim in this area and was regularly dredged in the past.
Five million dollars would go a long way to rehabilitate our
terrible roads.
Ben van Noort
Prince George
