Sisters residents gather to hear flood preparation

The city of Sisters held a meeting Friday night to discuss a plan in the case of flooding.

Several Sisters city officials gave a presentation tonight on their part of the contingency plan in the case of a flood.

Residents attending the forum said they had noticed a rise in Whychus Creek, which runs through the town..

“Thursday morning, the creek had come up quite a bit,” resident Roger Van Zyle said. “It was going much faster, and it was muddy looking. Friday morning, the creek was about the same height, but it was clear and cleaner. This afternoon, before I came to this meeting, I could see it had gone down a little bit.”

Good news for now, but Sisters still might be the first city in Central Oregon to experience a severe negative impact of all this snowpack. If it all melts too fast, the city might be inundated with overflow.

“You have five, six inches of water sitting around the low elevations, the basins,” Oregon Water Resources Department Regional Manager Kyle Gorman explained. “When that melts and runs off, it’s going to cause flooding in streets, drains — localized flooding, we call that urban flooding.”

“Whychus Creek is prone to rain on snow events, where we’ll have a very rapid rise and then a recession very quickly,” Gorman said.

The current flow of Whychus Creek is about 1,000 cubic feet per second. The highest volume recorded was around 2,000, but that was 35 years ago.

Not everyone was pleased with the breadth of topics covered in the meeting. One Sisters resident brought up what he saw as the worst-case scenario — one he thought they didn’t quite cover enough.

“We don’t have enough helicopters to get everybody out of here,” Gerald Tewalt said. “So we could become an island, and there’s got to be some other discussion.”

At this point, the hope is for little or no more rain and not-too-warm temperatures.