LangleyAdvance Your community newspaper since 1931
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
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Bill Robinson an his grandson Trenten checked out a miniature landslide caused by heavy rains Sunday near Grade Crescent.
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SPRING BOGS NOW IN STOCK Weather
Drenching rains flood homes, roads Langley got almost a month’s worth of rain in a single day on Sunday. SHOP ONLINE stampede.ca
The waters on the Nicomekl floodplain were already starting to recede Monday morning, but they had closed nearby 53rd Avenue overnight.
by Matthew Claxton mclaxton@langleyadvance.com
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Langley got a good soaking on the weekend, and in the City it caused problems that required a fair bit of cleanup. “We were quite busy yesterday [Sunday] and last night,” said Kyle Simpson, the manager of engineering operations for the City. The City recorded 78 millimetres of rain falling in 24 hours, Simpson said. The average May rainfall, according to a Metro Vancouver report several years ago, is just a little more than 100 mm at a Surrey recording station, the closest to Langley. The most obvious damage is a washout that took a small chunk of the shoulder of Grade Crescent near H.D. Stafford Middle School. Equipment was coming in Monday to fix the hole, where earth slumped down into a ravine following the heavy rains. Bill Robinson went down to the edge of the gap with his grandson Trenten Robinson to check out the damage Monday morning.
Matthew Claxton Langley Advance
The same creek had damaged part of the Robinson family driveway, they said. Trenten, 13, has lived in the neighbourhood his whole life and has never seen anything like that, he said. Traffic was still flowing down Grade Crescent, though cones were keeping drivers away from the edge. Over Sunday afternoon and evening, there were also about 15 calls from City residents about flooded basements. Some residents came in to pick up sandbags to guard their properties from flooding.
Two roads had to be closed down temporarily, including the 19800 block of 53rd Avenue and the 20400 block of Duncan Creek. “One of the creeks was flowing over the road there,” said Simpson. Standby staff were called in after 4 p.m. and one extra staff member was needed to deal with all the calls, Simpson said. By morning, the waters had receded in the creeks and there were no more reports of flooding. The Township got off relatively easily compared to the City. “We didn’t have to close any roads,” said Roland Zwaag, direc-
tor of public works. There was flooding, however. Cathy Empey of Brookswood said she and her neighbour had flooded basements, and the Township’s firefighters were called in to help. “It felt like the rain was never going to end,” said Empey, who thanked the firefighters for their work. Crews were out Monday morning cleaning up a few sites where gravel had been washed out of road shoulders and had been dumped on the streets, including at 72nd Avenue and 208th Street, Zwaag said.