Advertisement.
The Town of Hay River will hold a public meeting on Wednesday to prepare residents for the 2022 spring flood season. Fort Simpson holds a similar meeting on Tuesday.
The Fort Simpson meeting takes place from 6:30pm at the village recreation centre. Residents can also access the meeting via Zoom using a link on the village’s website.
Fort Simpson was badly affected by flooding in 2021 and hundreds of residents were temporarily displaced. This month, the village issued a Q&A about how an evacuation this year will be managed.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
Hay River’s meeting, from 7pm at the town’s community centre, is open to all residents. People with Vale Island or West Channel homes are particularly encouraged to attend.
Those areas have been the subject of flood-related evacuation orders in each of the past two years (May 4-6, 2020 and May 7-10, 2021).
The town said Wednesday’s meeting would focus on flood preparedness, registration and evacuation procedures, flood mitigation activities, and the current conditions and forecasting.
The NWT doesn’t possess the same level of flood forecasting available to many southern communities, but the territory’s hydrologists are able to make some broader assessments of water levels and then refine their projections as the ice begins to break.
A dedicated page of the Town of Hay River’s website contains minutes of recent meetings held by a community organization committee. The page will also host daily breakup reports and webcam images of various stretches of river as breakup begins.
