The Mayor of Merritt suggests his administration is looking at potentially financing its own repairs of the city’s dyking system as it continues to wait for federal assistance, nearly two years after the city was washed out by massive flooding.

Mike Goetz notes they’ve been attempting to secure federal funding for well over a year for a wholesale upgrade to the dykes along the Coldwater River, suggesting as they continue to wait, the threat of flooding — particularly in the current drought conditions — looms large this fall for certain homes.

“We have certain areas of our river and the dyking on Coldwater where there is no dyke so we would have to look at those spots, I’m not talking about a fully engineered thing, basically a band-aid solution.”

The full cost of repairing the dykes in Merritt is estimated to cost as high as $ 160 million, something Goetz notes taxpayers in the city of 7,000 can’t afford.

“We are still waiting almost two years to get any kind of federal help to rebuild these dykes, to the point now that we are deciding to possibly go with a plan B where we do it ourselves because we can’t keep going through freshets.”

He says a major frustration is the bureaucracy over who is responsible for the repairs.

“If you want the municipality to take it over, that is great, we will take it over but, you gotta make sure the funding is there for us to fix the problem when it comes up for any community but if the province wants to take it over, then they have to have the funding which then would rely on the feds to help with that kind of funding.”

This follows revelations in a new report which has unveiled that the City of Merritt and the BC government were warned in 2018 — but did nothing — about structural defects in the dyking system which eventually led to the city being washed out by the 2021 atmospheric river three-years later.