“It’s gone from an emergency to a disaster.” Those are words from the Mayor of Cache Creek, as his community continues to deal with flooding, brought on by a rapid increase in temperatures.

Mayor John Ranta says the situation in his community keeps getting worse.

“Despite the fact the hydrologist thought the river level would come down today (Wednesday), it doesn’t appear to be coming down at all. It looks like it is getting worse to me, the river is flowing through the Cache Creek Fire Hall, in one door, and out the other door.”

He says it comes as the Village of Cache Creek expanded an evacuation order to cover five properties, as well as evacuation alerts for low-lying properties in the Cache Creek area — including roughly 15 homes along Old Cariboo Road.

“Evacuation alerts generally predate an evacuation order and with the amount of water coming down, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more evacuation orders,” said Ranta.

“I was speaking to somebody from hydro who says that there’s a pole over on the west side of the community or near Old Cariboo Road, and that has been undermined so they’ve cut the power off there — There is no power to the post office and a section of Old Cariboo Road.”

Meanwhile, in Cache Creek’s downtown core, Ranta says it appears to be underwater.

“There is water in the Oasis Hotel. The Desert Motel has sandbags up but, I don’t think that held anything back, and the rest of the community is looking quite devastated at the present time.”

Ranta adds that Highway 97 is also closed in both directions near the intersection of the Trans Canada Highway.

“This is the worst I have ever seen it, sitting here at the corner of Highway 1 and Highway 97, there is a river flowing down the highway,” he said. “Based on what I am seeing right now, it is highly unlikely that Highway 97 will reopen (Wednesday), it is a river.”

The BC River Forecast Centre raised a flood watch for the Lower Thompson to a flood warning, and the entire community remains under a local state of emergency.

At this point, Ranta says it will be a waiting game, as they wait for the river to go back down.

“I’m sure there’s some blockage in the culverts under the roads and you can’t do anything about that until the river goes down enough to see into the culvert,” he said.

“That’s going to take a few days I think based on the amount of water that’s coming down right now.”

While the Bonaparte River has come up quite a bit over the last couple of days, Ranta says it is not threatening as of Wednesday morning.