River levels adjusting following hot, dry summer

NORTH VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – A pair of fishermen had to be rescued from the Capilano River early Friday.

So where are water levels as we head into the wet season?

The hot and dry summer did a lot to keep river levels low in the Lower Mainland, says Dave Campbell with the River Forecasting Centre. “Some of the rivers are lower than normal, others are a bit more normal so that’s the backdrop heading into typically what is the wet season.”

But he says that can change pretty quickly. “The rivers themselves are what we call flashy so they really do respond quickly to the rainfall when we get them. They respond very quickly to rainfall so even if they are low, we get big storm that comes in, the rivers really do respond in a matter of hours. We can see it’s a big type storm it can go from being very dry to flood conditions in under a day.”

He says things change fast when storm clouds roll in. “These really we Pacific storms, it’s the time of year when we expect to see those happening and we typically get about six or eight of them over the year and those can cause flooding if they are exceptionally extreme.”

For now, most water levels remain stable in the rivers of the Lower Mainland.