It's painfully obvious I don't post here often. Okay, it's ridiculously obvious. However, the time has come when I feel it necessary to make another post.
My brother in law is having difficulties in the wake of the recent death of his wife. I explain more at the gofundme page I set up to raise money for him (see the link below). If you could spare the time, a dime, or just the link itself, we would be eternally grateful.
Thanks to you all, my appreciation knows no bounds.
http://www.gofundme.com/d58004
Charlie
Floods, Sweat and Tears
On the morning of Thursday, June 20, 2013, my wife and I were evacuated from our home due to the imminent danger posed by Cougar Creek in Canmore, Alberta. The world knows the story of the resulting floods that have affected so many in southern Alberta. But there are many individual tales to be told, and I would like to share ours. If anyone else who has been affected by these floods would like to share their story here, I would be honoured to post it for you.
Tuesday 19 August 2014
Monday 1 July 2013
Thursday 27 June 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
We woke up at our usual time. It can be
pretty light out at six a.m. this time of year, but on this
particular day it was gloomy, which was to be expected considering
the heavy rains that had been falling since the day before and had
yet to let up. I went through my normal routine of making a tea and
starting up my computer so that I could go online and see what was
what with the world before getting ready for work.
My first clue that something was not
right came when I heard a helicopter coming in for a landing just
beyond the fence that separates my neighbourhood from the Trans
Canada Highway at the east end of Canmore. We live across the highway
from a commercial helipad so we are used to hearing helicopters, but
this was louder than usual, much louder. I looked out the window and
saw it coming down so close that it must have been landing on the
westbound lanes of the highway itself.
There were a few people out in the
street, some talking while huddled under umbrellas and others heading
either towards or away from the corner where Grotto Road turns right
and then runs uphill parallel to the east bank of Cougar Creek, which
is approximately four hundred and twenty-five feet (or one hundred
and thirty metres) from our house.
When the phone rang, I nearly jumped
out of my skin. My wife Sue answered it and after a short
conversation, told me it was her friend who lived by the creek. She
had been evacuated a few hours ago and was now in Banff. Not being
one to sit and wait quietly for anything, Sue got dressed and went
out to see what was going on. When she came back a few minutes later,
she said, simply: “This is bad.”
Cougar Creek had begun to spill over
its banks.
To know just how terrifying this was to
us, you would have to have lived here for a while. Cougar Creek is
probably deep enough in most of the section that runs from above the
Elk Run Bridge down to the Trans Canada Highway that you could plunk
my one storey house in the middle of it and the peak of the roof
would probably not be above the top of the banks. As for its width,
the pedestrian bridge over the creek is about one hundred and twenty
feet long, or just under forty metres. In any average year, the creek
is dry as a bone except during heavy rains or during the spring
runoff as the snowpack in the mountains melts and comes down from
Cougar Canyon. When either of these occur, a stream runs down the
middle of the creek that's generally small enough that many people
who want to get from one side to the other simply climb down into the
creek and find a spot where they can jump over it rather than walk
all the way up to one of the bridges. Which means, despite having run
strong enough in the past to erode the banks and cause significant
damage to the walking paths lining it, it has never, as far as I had
known as of that morning, ever come close to rising high enough to
spill over it's banks.
It didn't take long for Sue to convince
me that we should start packing some things just in case. Actually,
she didn't say 'just in case', she flat out said “We're going to be
evacuated too, I know it.”
When the knock came on the door around
8 a.m., we were as ready as we could be. We were instructed to go to
a public works facility a few blocks away, near the Canmore RCMP
detachment, so we loaded our car with our suitcases and our two cats
Casey and Finnigan in their carriers and drove over to the facility,
which had a main building with some offices and three large vehicle
bays in a garage. Town employees had set up some tables and chairs in
one of the three bays. We were among the earliest to arrive, but
before long, it started to fill up with individuals, couples like us,
and entire families with kids and pets in tow, including some friends
from our street who came and sat with us.
A woman in an orange vest told us where
to find the washrooms and so on. I called my boss and told him what
was happening and he graciously offered to have us come to his home
if we could get across the creek. Not long after we had arrived, we
were told that if we wanted, we would be allowed to drive across Elk
Run Bridge, the only remaining way over the creek, and go to a better
equipped evacuation centre in the main part of town. If the bridge
were to fail, we would be completely cut off. We decided to go and
trundled the boys back into the car and set off. Unfortunately, when
we got to the bridge, we were turned back and had to return to the
public works building.
And so the waiting began. The woman in
the vest told us we might be there for a while, explained where the
limited facilities were, and that the deli just down the street was
still open if we wanted to get some food. Sue has dietary issues that
make it imperative she knows every ingredient in the food she eats,
so I headed over there to get something for myself so that what
little food we had brought with us would be all hers.
At this point, we really had no idea
just how bad it was getting until our friends showed us a video on
their smartphone. It is now well known, showing the rear of one of
the houses that backed onto the creek on our side, their side fence
hanging in mid air, the land that had once been their back yard gone.
I was stunned. This was no ordinary
event, this was a full on natural disaster. Word started spreading
around that those in the know thought if one of the houses on the
creek went in, part of the raging torrent chewing away at the banks
of Cougar Creek could divert right into our neighbourhood with its
hundreds of homes.
I have never felt such a sense of
overpowering fear and helplessness. There was nothing we could do but
sit there staring at the tiny screen waiting to see if everything we
owned would be swept away.
Then the power went out.
To everyone's credit, the room remained
calm. I held Sue's hand as we huddled over our boys' carriers and
tried to comfort them. After about a half an hour – I had to check
afterward because it seemed like half a day – the power came back
on. The woman who had been briefing us soon came back and told us
there were porta-potties being set up outside to ease the pressure on
the two washrooms meant for a dozen or so people, not the hundred or
more that now crowded the truck bay, offices and other small rooms in
the facility. She looked frazzled, but in control. I couldn't help
wondering how we must have looked to her.
The waiting dragged on with no news
until she came back and told us they had managed to arrange some
buses to get us into the main part of town and the far superior
facilities set up at Elevation Place and the high school. As I noted
above, the only way to get to town was over the Elk Run Bridge where
we had been turned back only hours before because it had been deemed
too dangerous. But our choices were simple: stay where we were with
its extremely limited resources and hope that the bridge held until
the crisis was over, knowing full well that if it did go down we
would be completely cut off from help except by helicopter; or get on
the buses and hope to hell we made it across before the bridge
failed. As far as I could tell, everyone who had been holed up in
that public works facility got on the buses.
After stowing our belongings in the
compartments slung low on the sides of the school bus those with pets
had been assigned to, we climbed on board with our boys in their
carriers. It was jammed full of people, so we ended up having to
stand in the aisles. Absurdly I thought about rules governing
passenger loads and standing in a moving school bus and had to stifle
a laugh. At this point nobody gave a flying fig about such things, of
course. We just piled in and held on. Sue had been ahead of me with
Finnigan in the smaller of our two carriers and by the time I got on,
there were a few people between us in the aisle. No matter, we were
aboard. Casey's carrier was too wide to fit between the seats, so I
held him up as high as I could so that I wouldn't bonk anyone in the
head. A lady next to me had two carriers of her own stacked beside
her and when she saw me struggling with Casey, she told me to go
ahead and put him up on top of hers. Now we had a stack of three
terrified cats on the seat beside her next to the window, with me
leaning over her to try and hold them steady. As it turned out, she
also had a dog between her feet.
The bus began to move and we all held
on. It only took a few minutes to get up to the Elk Run Bridge where
the scene was even worse than the last time we'd been up that
morning. Sludgy water from the creek was pounding against the north
side of the bridge, some of it coming onto the roadbed. There were
backhoes and other heavy equipment, some right in the torrent,
digging away at all the rock and sediment that kept piling up against
the bridge and threatening to plug the underpass. If that happened,
all that water and rock and muck would have nowhere to go but up and
over into the neighbourhood. This wasn't just bad, as Sue had said
hours before, this was a nightmare.
We had to wait a minute or two, then we
were waved through. As we slowly rolled across, there were repeated
gasps of shock up and down the length of the bus as the full extent
of what was happening to our beautiful mountain home was revealed.
The east bank of the creek had been washed away right up to the backs
of the houses on that side. Rear decks – those that were still
there – hung out over nothingness at odd angles. Some foundations
were clearly visible, right to the bottom, as though someone had
taken a brush and scrubbed all the dirt off them. It was obvious that
if this kept up much longer, some houses could very well fall into
the creek. Later on, Sue told me that as we went by, one worker who
was standing in the muck digging at it with a shovel took a moment
to wave at us as we went by.
When we reached the other side,
everyone on board let out a cheer. I felt an immense sense of relief.
One hurdle had been cleared: we could no longer get trapped on the
east side of the creek. But the elation was short lived, of course.
We still had no idea if our house was okay or not. As soon as the bus
let us off at Elevation Place, I called my boss to let him know we
had arrived and he was there in minutes. We loaded our belongings and
the boys into his truck and we were off to the hotel where a room was
being held for us.
After loading Casey and Finnigan and
our belongings into the room, I closed the door and we started to get
settled in. It wasn't long before the tears came and we held each
other for a long while before either of us could bear to let go. We
were safe, and thanks to my boss we had a roof over our heads, but
there was still a long way to go. And so the second round of waiting
began.
There's not much to tell about the next
two days that most people affected by the flood don't already know.
The creek continued to rage and towns and cities downstream started
to prepare. We kept our eyes glued to the TV, ears to the radio, and
borrowed a laptop computer from work so that we could get on the
Internet. I have sleep apnea and had forgotten my cpap machine, so
when sleep did come it was fitful at best. Sue hardly slept at all.
Casey and Finnigan, for their part, adjusted remarkably well to their
new circumstances. After some tentative exploring they set about
finding the best spots in which to curl up and have a bath. They'll
always be our brave little boys. I made a couple of trips on foot
over to the grocery store to get some food and bottled water and came
back soaked to the skin.
Finally the rain and then the water
level in the creek began to subside. The immediate danger had passed,
but was our home still there? We had no idea until Friday evening
when a friend told us about a video taken only a few hours before,
showing our neighbourhood from the air. When I saw our home, saw that
the creek had not come into our street, saw that our house and
everything we had worked for over the past quarter century had not
been washed away … that's when I finally lost it.
We were allowed to go back home the
following afternoon, Saturday, June 22, 2013. As it had appeared in
the video, our home and those of most of our neighbours were
unharmed. The only damage we had, if you could call it that, was a
muffin we'd left on the kitchen counter that had a few spots of mould
growing on it. For me it punctuated just how close we had come to
losing everything we had, and how incredibly fortunate we were to be
able to basically resume our lives. Though that's not strictly true.
Our lives will never be the same.
Before this happened, I thought I had
the capacity to empathize with victims of natural disasters. Now I am
fully aware it is impossible for someone to know what it is like
unless you experience it yourself. Even though we are back home safe
and sound with all our property intact, every cloud in the sky now
evokes a jolt of anxiety and every drop of rain seems to sting when
it hits exposed skin. Even the mountains themselves are no longer the
same. Where before their closeness seemed comforting, now they loom
over us with hidden menace, the snow still at their tops no longer an
image of beauty but fuel for future danger. We feel disconnected, as
though we are characters in a science fiction novel who have stepped
through a portal into another universe that looks like the one we
were born into, but is subtly different, more malevolent.
To those who toiled tirelessly in the
creek to save our only route of escape and our homes, you have our
deepest gratitude, you are heroes in every sense of the word. Our
hearts go out to those who live along the creek and have suffered the
fate we so feared would befall us. Many homes have been damaged
beyond repair, of that I am sure. The creekside is changed forever,
and this change will be a constant reminder to all who lived through
the flood of 2013.
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