It's been a rainy couple of weeks, and it turned out the rain was more that the ground at the headwaters of the Bow River could take. I turned on the TV Thursday evening to see an emergency message flash - areas of Calgary were being evacuated. What?
Well, not our area, as it turned out. What do you do if part of your city is flooding? We had a very nice steak dinner, cooked perfectly by Collin. It was surreal - we could hear sirens in the distance, and helicopters overhead. The rain had stopped, briefly, and suddenly I couldn't get out the door fast enough to see what was going on.
We live about three city blocks from the river, in a neighborhood called Hillhurst. Our neighborhood was (and is) fine. Here's what we saw at 8pm on Thursday, June 21st.
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| 10 Street Bridge |
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| Poppy Plaza - the jogging path below is submerged |
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| Poppy Plaza |
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| Part of the memorial on the south side of the Bow |
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| Waters almost touching the Peace Bridge |
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| Memorial Drive, closed, and traffic leaving the Downtown area over the 10th Street Bridge |
We were evacuated around midnight on Thursday/Friday, and fortunately some friends of ours in the northwest of the city were willing to put us and our cat up for an indeterminate amount of the time.
Because Calgary is built around the confluence of two rivers, the Bow and the Elbow, when they flooded it impacted huge chunks of the city. There was a bad flood in 2005 that Calgarians called "The Flood of the Century". As of this morning, flood waters had risen four times higher than the highest water of 2005, and are now the highest on record. Authorities are not anticipating anybody being able to reenter the Downtown Core until Wednesday at the earliest. The Stampede is due to open on July 5th and the entire Stampede ground is under water.
Our apartment and belongings are fine, but there were a couple of images that made me very sad. The first,
an arial photo of Prince's Island. It's one of my favorite places to walk, and two weeks ago Collin and I celebrated our engagement at the River Cafe. The second was
a photo taken of a trussel bridge at the confluence of Nose Creek and the Bow River. I believe one of the first photos I posted on this blog was of the same place (but the photo was taken from the north bank). It's startling to realize the path I was on is now at least five feet under water.
I've learned a lot about Canadians during this event. When I remarked on how orderly and sensibly the evacuation went, my friend Bill had some insight to share. "Well, we're used to really bad storms here. If a storm is so bad the government tells you to do something because of it, you know it's really,
really bad. So you do what they tell you." I'm honestly shocked by how calmly residents complied with evacuation. So calmly, in fact, that as far as police know there have been only four fatalities (and they occurred in a town upriver, High River, when then the river first surged). That takes a lot of faith in your governmental agencies to do their job. (That faith was justified)
There's been a complete lack of histrionics. Mayor Nenshi (who deserves Mayor of the Year, as far as I'm concerned - if that award does not exist, it should be invented and given to him) has remained calm and organized, and done an excellent job communicating with the public. There hasn't been news stories with sweeping patriotic music and a flag waving gently in the background, while pictures of devastation scroll across the screen (you can bet there would have been if Calgary were a major American city - in fact, I've seen this emotionally-manipulative shlock so many times).
Finally, (and I know this phenomenon is a human characteristic, not just a Canadian one) the rush of support for strangers has been staggering. So many private individuals offered their homes to evacuated families that for the first night there were only 1,500 people in public shelters. That's out of 75,000 people evacuated. A massive music festival, Sled Island, has been cancelled because of the flooding and the musicians are just performing concerts wherever they are to keep the displaced entertained.
The
Red Cross is accepting donations for Alberta flood relief - more than Calgary has been affected. Many family farms in southern Alberta have had their entire crop destroyed. And now, as I write this, the
Siksika Nation is facing rising waters with only a tiny fraction of the resources Calgary had at its disposal.
As for me, I'll be out with a shovel just as soon as they let me.
