BOISE, Idaho — The recent rain and snow have us thinking back a couple of years to 2017 when record snowfall in the winter contributed to some serious flooding in the spring.
From the Wood River Valley to the Magic Valley to the Treasure Valley and even Eastern Oregon, people who lived in the area remember the flooded parking lots, homes and Boise River. So, KTVB asked if we could potentially see floods like that happen again.
“This is only the end of February so, certainly it is way too early to make any predictions about flooding or how the water might run off into the Boise River,” Ada County Emergency Management Director Doug Hardman said. “In 2017 of February, we had about 150-to-300 percent of average precipitation and we're nowhere near that right now.”
Hardman says the agency is currently monitoring the situation but they are seeing some interesting things, like the snowpack water content, which has doubled in the past six weeks.
“So we went from 65 percent to about 125 percent in a six-week time frame,” Hardman said.
He goes on to say the next two months, March and April, will be the most critical time.
In Eagle, the city is still working to repair damage left from 2017’s record flooding.
“We’ve been working with FEMA and we've got money to repair some of the damage on our trails, but what's important about that is, it's not just about repairing the pavement and things like that, it's re-establishing what the walls of the river are,” Eagle public information officer Tammy Gordon said. “So they're bringing a lot of riprap, lots of boulders to help alleviate some of the pains that rivers could potentially cause, some of that flooding.”
The city is now using the past to prepare for the future.
“In Eagle, it will actually start overflowing sooner than anywhere else so, this first flow will be really important to say what's going to happen,” Gordon said. “As scary as that time was in 2017, this year I can say it's now much easier to know what’s coming forward because we learned so much back then.”
The city of Eagle has a full-time trail staff checking and monitoring the river flows every day. As of Wednesday, there were no flood concerns.
Boise River flood risk management operations will begin on March 6.