He doesn’t raise his voice, and only swears once, but Keith Bevan is not a happy man.
A resident for two years of the trailer park nearest to the Cache Creek post office, Bevan is watching a backhoe operated by a member of the Village of Cache Creek crew dig mud and rocks out of the base of a gully directly opposite the trailer park’s entrance.
Every few minutes a dump truck rumbles along Old Cariboo Road to the backhoe, which loads the truck up. The debris is carted away and dumped, and the truck rumbles back. Rinse and repeat, in a ritual that has become all too familiar over the past three years.
The driveway of the trailer park is coated with debris for a good 30 feet at least. At the top of the driveway a berm of piled debris a couple of feet high sits to the left. It’s just before noon on Sunday, August 12, and heavy rains during the afternoon and evening of August 11 have once more caused devastation at the park.
It’s the third time Bevan has watched the park fill with mud in his two years there. What frustrates him and other park residents, he says, is the lack of action by the Village of Cache Creek, in the face of a geotech report that says what could be done to alleviate such consequences.
During this latest event, he says, more residents of the park were at home, so they were able to start deploying the sandbags they had used during flooding earlier in the year. “When the Village backhoe guy got here we got him to work with us, and dyke right across the road. We had water coming over the embankment right to the first trailer.
“In 20 minutes it went from ‘The park’s okay’ to ‘We’ve got water all the way up to the first trailer on the right hand side by the river.’ Within 30 minutes we had the embankment on the driveway give out, four feet of embankment near the river disappeared, we had about two feet of material build up. Last night we had a five-foot berm across the road.”
He says he got a copy of a geotech report that was provided to the Village late last year. “It states that this gully that comes down, that’s pointed right at the park, needs to have bars for debris, and the culvert needs to be more than two times bigger than what it is. It’s about a 45cm culvert, and they’re supposed to have at least a 100cm culvert in there.
“A number of us have been up to the Village office. I spoke to [former CAO] Keir [Gervais] when he was here, and essentially, to me, it was that they aren’t doing anything. One of the reasons was that they said there’s a gas line under here and they can’t dig around it, which to me is BS, because all they’ve gotta do is get hold of Fortis and re-do that.
“We’ve asked for cement barriers down the road to at least try to stop some of it, we’ve suggested a number of different things they might do that aren’t necessarily expensive, but at least it would keep the mud out of our park.”
Bevan points to the first trailer, and notes that the owner has been denied a rebuilding permit; he isn’t even sure if it’s still habitable. The residents of the trailer beyond it had just re-done their yard after the May 2018 flooding—new gravel, new deck—and now they’re under two inches of mud and water again. Bevan says his trailer is second from the far end of the park, and the water reached all the way to his place.
“It’s ridiculous, and you don’t get any answers from the Village.”
He has high praise for the Village crew member, Jordan Cumming, who was at work at the site on Saturday evening and back again on Sunday. “He was working like a Trojan, trying to help, but as fast as he was digging that hole out it out it was filled right back up.
And it was a different material that came down. Last time it was mostly ash and soot-type material, but this time it was a lot of gravel.”
More worrying to Bevan is what’s still up the gully: a number of large boulders, up to four feet across, which have been undermined, and which have had more boulders come down behind them during this last rain. “All we need is another big rain, and we could end up …” His voice trails off.
He’s flown his quad copter above the site to get a good look at it.
“On the side of the gully is a barren section. If that lets loose, this whole park’s gonna be gone. The Village really needs to get their act together and do something.”
Bevan says that a number of residents plan to go to the Village office again, but he expects they’ll get the same response. “The owner of the park has gone to the Village. It’s bad enough we’ve gotta worry about the river; now we’re getting this, and this is going to become a regular thing, because we’ve got no vegetation up the hill. There’s nothing to soak up any of that water.
“When you go up there you can see the gullies that have been cut into those bare embankments from the rains. There’s two gullies feeding the top of this one now, instead of just one.
“Because it’s kind of a saddle up above us, everything comes down the hillside and collects. It used to run off both ends, but for some reason it all seems to be running down here now. I think it’s because stuff has shifted, slid, and formed a bit of a dam up there.”
He points to a small gully leading into the larger one that is causing the problems. “That wasn’t there [before]. Now everything that comes down comes straight down there.”
The dump truck has pulled up again, and the backhoe is once more filling it up with black mud and gravel. Bevan says that the Village crew understands what they’re going through.
“Unfortunately, they’ve got their restrictions, We asked if they could even just run a piece of equipment down our road, just to clear that three inches of mud off it. The first 18 feet of the driveway belongs to the Village. But they’re not allowed to go in onto private property, apparently.
“The problem is that myself, I have a heart condition. Most of us either have medical issues or are retired or elderly. There’s only a couple of people in there that are under 50. So it’s been up to us to try and protect ourselves. It’s been really, really frustrating for us.”
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