When Mother Nature decides to unleash her fury, there is very little that can stand in her way and that is what has been happening over the prairie provinces during the past week.
I say the past week because I had occasion to drive to Manitoba at the early part of the week and it was hard to believe that water could accumulate in such a manner.
Saskatoon received five inches ( 125mm) in one day earlier on in the week. As I drove by the area between the Battlefords and Saskatoon, I saw several farm homes that had water up to the tops of the first floor windows. It was as if people had built their home smack dab in the middle of a small lake. To top it off, these homes were the kind that would cost between 6-8 hundred thousand dollars in this part of the woods. One home had a five car garage attached and it was a beauty, well not so where it sat.
So let’s move onto later in the week and the same low pressure that seems to have been rolling in from the east (an unusual way for the weather pattern to arrive) hit southern Alberta . We have had plenty of footage of Calgary and southern Alberta, but there are a lot of folks still to report from the rural parts, who have lost everything.
Now if you add on another day and suddenly the area of the province of Manitoba that I left, Dauphin, received a major dump of rain to the point that they also had floods, as did Gladstone Manitoba, south of Dauphin.
But the focus has been on the areas where the biggest floods hit:
- the Calgary region, 65,000 people forced from their homes, the downtown of Calgary shut down at a cost of $125 million a day in lost productivity.
- The communities of Drumheller, hit by the flooding Red Deer River.
- Medicine Hat splitting that city in half as a precaution, and
- communities along the way in Saskatchewan bracing for yet another blast of water.
The cost of this damage may never be known , it is in such a large area of three provinces to get a proper handle on it.
Through it all there remained that prairie spirit. I pulled up to talk to a man who was launching his boat west of Saskatoon. I said , " You going fishing?" "Yes" he replied "I am going over to my house which is on the other side of the trees, and try and fish some of my personal belongings out of it. The dog got me up the other night , I thought he wanted out to go to the bathroom . The water was just edging its way into the house , so maybe he had a swim in mind."
That is the kind of spirit that you see the people displaying. In many cases they may have lost everything but they’re determined to rebuild and recover.
I’m Meisner and that’s one man’s opinion.
Comments
The poor people that decided to build on low ground. Someone show be held accountable for letting them do this!!
That relatively easy. Many of the larger cities, including Prince George, started life as a town on the river and then the railroad. It can often be traced to those early beginnings. That is so often true not only in North America, but the rest of the world. People develop habitations along waterfronts – rivers, lakes, oceans.
Some of the area’s around Calgary that were built up in the past few years probably should not have allowed residential. In fact I believe that there was some discussion around these developments being subject to floods because of their location, however they were built.
Ben’s observation that the rain was coming in from the East is interesting because as far as I know the weather usually goes from West to East. Seems when it comes from the East it is prone to stay around, and this is what has been happening. Many many days of torrential rain, therefore causing major flooding.
Don’t see how anyone could have planned to avoid this situation, other than building on higher ground.
So now “waterfront property’ is not all that it was cracked up to be now , eh?
Building on higher ground is easy in BC or parts of Alberta, not so much for that swath of land right in the middle of the North American continent. They don’t call it the Great Plains for nothing!
What gus wrote is also true. Unless you want to relocate an entire city, flood damage is going to happen. This is especially true for places where the water really has no natural feature to contain it. If you drive along some of the rivers in the Prairies, you realize that they only have to rise a few feet for the damage to be extensive. A river running through a valley in BC or Alberta, while typically much faster, is also contained and I suspect it would take a much more significant increase in water volume before major issues arose (like what occurred in Calgary).
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