Wednesday, June 22, 2005
After the Flood
It's Wednesday morning here, June 22nd, and the City of Calgary has just lifted its State of Emergency, although the water restrictions will still be force until the weekend. The City people are out in force fining people for watering their gardens, washing their cars, etc. We haven't run the dishwasher or the washing machine for 3 days now, but we will have to today as they are pretty full! It's been swelteringly hot for the last couple of days, 28 degrees yesterday and impossibly clear, blue skies. A big thunderstorm went by just south of us last night, with evil, black clouds and cracks of lightning. It was too warm in the night, about 20 degrees and we had the fan on all night. There were also tornados and funnel clouds touching down in the southern part of the province. When I left the house at 06:30 this morning, it was still 18 degrees. We're expecting more thunder tonight and maybe a bit of rain tomorrow. If it comes, it'll push the amount of rain received in June over the 'highest ever recorded'.
The floodwaters have now largely receded, and 80% of the people evacuated from the banks of the Elbow river have now returned home. There's a huge effort at the moment in pumping out flooded basements and trying to stop mould growing in the hot, damp houses. We're awful glad we live up on a hill and have a walk-out as opposed to an underground basement! The City has set up a Disaster Recovery Centre in the South-West to allow people to register for compensation, etc. The Fish Creek Provincial Park in the SW has been closed as 15 of its footbridges are now missing, having been swept away. They say it'll take years to fix the Park, as the course of the river has now altered. The city as a whole has sustained about 200 million dollars of damage in the last week.
Residents of Drumheller (east of here) got good warning that the Red Deer River was going to burst its banks, and spent much of the weekend sand-bagging their homes and building 5-metre dykes along the river as it passes through the centre of town. When it came, the river rose to the top of the dykes but didn't go over, so the town was saved from major flooding.
On a sadder note, police have now called off the search for a teenager who went missing while walking home from the north-west early on Sunday morning. She was crossing a footbridge over the Bow, just south of Bowness Park, and she called a friend on her mobile to say that the water on the bridge was ankle deep (i.e. that the bridge was actually in the river). No-one's heard from her since, and she's been declared missing, presumed drowned. She'll probably turn up downstream somewhere when the river gets back to normal. It's a long way to Hudson Bay.
The floodwaters have now largely receded, and 80% of the people evacuated from the banks of the Elbow river have now returned home. There's a huge effort at the moment in pumping out flooded basements and trying to stop mould growing in the hot, damp houses. We're awful glad we live up on a hill and have a walk-out as opposed to an underground basement! The City has set up a Disaster Recovery Centre in the South-West to allow people to register for compensation, etc. The Fish Creek Provincial Park in the SW has been closed as 15 of its footbridges are now missing, having been swept away. They say it'll take years to fix the Park, as the course of the river has now altered. The city as a whole has sustained about 200 million dollars of damage in the last week.
Residents of Drumheller (east of here) got good warning that the Red Deer River was going to burst its banks, and spent much of the weekend sand-bagging their homes and building 5-metre dykes along the river as it passes through the centre of town. When it came, the river rose to the top of the dykes but didn't go over, so the town was saved from major flooding.
On a sadder note, police have now called off the search for a teenager who went missing while walking home from the north-west early on Sunday morning. She was crossing a footbridge over the Bow, just south of Bowness Park, and she called a friend on her mobile to say that the water on the bridge was ankle deep (i.e. that the bridge was actually in the river). No-one's heard from her since, and she's been declared missing, presumed drowned. She'll probably turn up downstream somewhere when the river gets back to normal. It's a long way to Hudson Bay.
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