Officials with the British Columbia government and the City of Merritt were aware of significant problems with dikes for several years before the southern Interior community suffered devastating flooding in 2021, documents released through a freedom of information request show.
The documents obtained by the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) show a registered professional engineer found numerous problems in 2018 with dikes protecting the city, which lies around 190 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
Aaron Hahn with the B.C.-based consulting company Interior Dams reiterated the same concerns in 2019, 2020 and in June 2021, just five months before flooding forced more than 7,000 people out of their homes.
Dike maintenance
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