The race is on to evacuate an animal shelter in B.C.'s Bulkley River valley as rising flood waters threaten to cut off the centre from dry land.

The area surrounding Turtle Gardens Animal Rescue in Topley, more than 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver, came under a mandatory evacuation order Thursday. But shelter owner Yvette Labatte refuses to leave without the 43 abandoned and semi-feral dogs currently being rehabilitated at the rural treatment centre.

Labatte and her husband Dave watched water levels on their property rise dramatically on Wednesday, first spilling the banks of the Bulkley River and then flooding their land, including the dog's exercise yards. The only road connecting their home to the town was shut down. The only access now is by boat.

The couple was told to leave the property yesterday by the regional district of Bulkley-Nechako, which said that warmer temperatures and snowmelt this weekend would cause water levels to rise even higher.

"They told us to go to Burns Lake because they found a hotel for us there. But they said they don't take dogs, and I said there's no way I'm going without them," she told ctvbc.ca in a telephone interview Friday.

"We were stranded – there's nowhere I could go with the dogs."

There is six inches of murky water flooding their greenhouse – the flood line ends just four inches from their home.

Labatte can't speculate how deep the water is in their yard, only that "it's up to the belly of one of our happiest Labrador Retrievers."

The dogs in the centre range from a pair of abandoned Border Collie-crosses just 13 weeks old to a 22-year-old long-haired Dachshund named Marty.

A break came for the centre this morning, when Labatte found out she could use an old trailer parked behind the fire hall in Topley for shelter until the flooding ends. Dave and his friends are now in the process of cleaning it out and installing hydro to make it livable. Now she just needs to get there with her horde of four-legged friends.

While the larger dogs can walk up the hill behind the home to the road, the smaller canines will be loaded into crates, and then driven in wheelbarrows.  Many of the dogs aren't leash trained because they were either abandoned or found in the wild.

Lance Hamblin, chair of the regional district of Bulkley-Nechako, spearheaded the rescue effort to bring the dogs to safety. He said the dogs will be shuttled across the lake that used to be a road in a 14-foot aluminum boat, run by a volunteer. The process will take as long as three hours.

"The road is very flooded so this is the only option," he told ctvbc.ca. "We do what we can in times like this."

Labatte says she expects to stay in the trailer for up to a month, saying the late spring mountain runoff will make the flooding worse before things get better. Volunteers from the Northwest Animal Shelter will be spending the weekend building fencing around the temporary housing to accommodate the makeshift shelter.

She admits it's going to be a tight squeeze living with more than 40 dogs in such a small space, but says the dogs don't mind a bit.

"There are another two outbuildings so they can have a place to stay. They crowd in touching all the time. They like to be part of a pack and they sleep all together," she said.

What is more troubling to Labatte is the prospect of returning to the home she's lived in for 14 years.

"We're going to need ongoing supplies but cleanup is terrible," she said. "If there's a home to go home to at the end of this it's going to be devastating."

The shelter is in need of supplies like blankets and towels and leashes, as well as volunteers to help clean the property once the water subsides.