Mother Nature delivers heavy rains, flash flooding to PG

Depending on where you live, Prince George saw between 27 and 30 millimetres of rainfall over several hours on Monday night, causing flash flooding along 7th Avenue and Dominion St.

According to Environment Canada, it was the rainiest August 26th on record in PG but fell short of an all-time monthly record.

“With that said, I do note that in 1948 on the 4th of August, which was the rainiest day in August in our history with the weather stations seeing 50 millimetres.”

Castellan mentioned an area just south of city limits received the biggest brunt of the storm.

“A volunteer observer, southwest of town in Beaverly noted that they recorded 39.1 millimetres of rain – so that is a pretty big total.”

Castellan added just over 12 millimetres fell in the 7 o’clock hour alone.

“At the 7pm mark is when the heaviest cell hit the downtown core. It was still there for the better part of four hours right through to about 11pm and then there was a bit of a break and then at about 2am, more of the rain fell.”

On average, Prince George sees 47 millimetres of rain during August.

“To see 30 odd millimetres making up well over half of your monthly budget all in one fell swoop is pretty impressive,” said Castellan.

However, the wet weather and early-week cool spell will come to an end by the Labour Day weekend with daytime highs predicted to reach 27 degrees Sunday and Monday.

The most precipitation ever to fall over a single day in Prince George was April 5th of 1913 as 65.3 millimetres dropped from the sky.

The City of Prince George issued a statement to MyPGNow.com regarding the flash flooding at 7th Avenue and Dominion Street.

“The underground stormwater infrastructure in this area around 7th Avenue and Dominion was built in the 60’s. Actually, much of the City’s stormwater system was built in the 60’s and 70’s. What we’ve seen lately weather-wise are more frequent storms with high volumes of rain. Older stormwater infrastructure was not designed to handle these high intensity rain events and we end up with floods occurring. We intend to investigate our storm system in this area to ensure there’s not a break there and the pooling is only due to the volume of rain and not something else, but we don’t have that information at this stage. This is another example of why the City is looking to create a dedicated fund for stormwater infrastructure.”