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Emergency Ready Plan
Birds eye view of river in Grand Forks. Trees, roads and buildings are along the river edge

From disaster to community empowerment – how Grand Forks came together to rebuild

After a week of high temperatures and three days of continuous rainfall, on May 10, 2018, the Kettle and Granby rivers exceeded a one-in-200-year flood level. Conditions were made worse by rapid melting of a snowpack that was almost two and a half times the average for early May. As a result, thousands of people in Grand Forks and the Boundary region were forced to evacuate, with homes, businesses, livelihoods and critical infrastructure lost or damaged.

Since then, the City of Grand Forks has undertaken extensive flood-mitigation work to help prevent a similar event in the future. The Province has provided more than $44 million in investment since 2018 to support projects to help flood recovery and mitigation in Grand Forks and the surrounding areas.

The City’s Flood Mitigation Program is now more than 75 per cent complete, and includes a new dike and drainage system, the installation of fish habitat structures and the planting of 45,000 trees and shrubs along the Kettle River channel banks and riparian areas.

The program reduces flood risk by protecting the city’s core neighbourhoods, businesses, industries and critical infrastructure, while restoring nine hectares of floodplain to create important room for the river to flood, which already proved itself during the 2023 freshet season when new flood defences protected houses and businesses from damaging floodwaters.

In addition, it has helped to meet requirements to restore habitats impacted by dike construction.

Jennifer Wetmore, who now works for Community Futures BC, was the team lead for economic recovery during the flooding.

“What happened to us in 2018 wasn’t easy, but we’ve come a long way,” said Wetmore. “We leaned on each other, we supported each other, and we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have the level of support we’ve received from the Province and from the federal government. The downtown core came back and came back looking better than it was before.”

Completed flood mitigation works for downtown Grand Forks (City Park in foreground), North Ruckle Dike and Floodplain Naturalization in background. (August 2024)
Completed flood mitigation works for downtown Grand Forks (City Park in foreground), North Ruckle Dike and Floodplain Naturalization in background. (August 2024)

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