British Columbia has announced that Disaster Financial Assistance (DFA) is now available to eligible British Columbians in the central region who may have been impacted from the flooding that began on May 4th, 2017.

DFA is available to home owners, residential tenants, small business owners, farmers, charitable organizations, and local government bodies who were unable to obtain insurance to cover these disaster-related losses.

In March, the province announced that it would invest $80 million in emergency preparedness and flood mitigation. Flood management measures, including flood insurance, are increasingly front page news in Canada. While most Canadian homeowners are financially unprepared for the impacts of flooding, the Canadian insurance industry has been actively working to expand their coverage of flooding events.

Applications for the May flooding event in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, the North Okanagan Regional District, the Columbia Shuswap Regional District, the Okanagan-Similkameen Regional District and the Central Okanagan Regional District (including all electoral areas and municipalities within each regional district) must be submitted to Emergency Management BC (EMBC) by August 5, 2017.

DFA is available to local governments for:

  • Emergency response measures authorized by EMBC by response task number, including incremental costs associated with their Emergency Operations Centre. Financial assistance is provided for each accepted response claim at 100 per cent. Completed response claim summaries and supporting documentation must be sent to the respective EMBC Regional Office.
  • Recovery measures to replace essential materials and rebuild or replace essential public infrastructures to the condition it was in before the disaster. Assistance is provided for each accepted recovery claim at 80 per cent of the amount of total eligible damage that exceeds $1,000.

British Columbians can access the DFA application at: http://www.gov.bc.ca/disasterfinancialassistance

The government has also made available Johanna Morrow, manager of recovery and funding programs for EMBC, in discussion about flood insurance and British Columbia’s DFA program: https://soundcloud.com/bcgov/bc_flood_insurance_dfa?in=bcgov/sets/emergencyinfobc

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