Watching the rain fall heavily outside the library recently I thought of Ray LaMontagne’s song, God Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise. The song is a letter from a man to his wife. He’s a rancher stuck in the mountains, watching the “steady rain, ‘bout to drive us all insane”, hoping he’ll be able to make it home again. Watching the downpour, I knew I would make it home again – I just wished I’d remembered to bring an umbrella to work.
The Calgary flood has many of us looking at our local rivers and creeks with a new eye. It is my family’s summer tradition to head to Calgary to float down the bucolic Elbow River on air mattresses. The usual problem on the Elbow is not enough water, necessitating standing up and dragging your floatie to deeper water. It was hard to square this Elbow in my mind with the images of the raging river flooding those gorgeous Elbow Park homes. Or Canmore, my parents’ home for years, where the tiny Cougar and Stewart Creeks I know quickly became massive torrents.
Here in St. Albert we have the Mighty Sturgeon, as I mockingly refer to the Sturgeon River. In front of St. Albert Place the river is so still it is hard to tell which direction it runs. But the Sturgeon wasn’t always so. Father Lacombe building a bridge over the Sturgeon in 1862 was a major feat. In 1914 there was enough water for Fleuri Perron and Cheri Hebert to start a paddlewheel boat service, taking passengers on excursions from St. Albert to Big Lake. But within a few years the water level had dropped in Big Lake and the service was discontinued.
While the Sturgeon seems to diminish year by year, we can see from the southern Alberta floods that those once-in-a-century floods do happen. The last big flood of the Sturgeon was in 1974 and since then the City of St. Albert has done a good job of making sure development stays out of the 100-year flood plain. In 2011 the city updated the designated flood line, pushing it a bit higher than the established 1991 line. Still, I find the line uncomfortably close to where St. Albert Place and the library sit. I’m glad my office is on the second floor!
Looking at how St. Albert has kept development out of the Sturgeon floodplain, one wonders how multi-million dollar homes were built in recent years all along the banks of the Elbow in Calgary. I don’t think anyone begrudges the promises by the Alberta government to rebuild homes in Calgary and southern Alberta, but perhaps this is an expensive lesson in the value of prevention.
When I see Albertans working together to respond to the flood, I can’t help but compare the response to the flooding of New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There are many good books which dissect what went wrong in New Orleans, but I recommend Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, a non-fiction book that reads like a novel. Eggers tells the story of official incompetence and actual wilful misconduct through the harrowing account of one family and one man's experience. Pick up a copy and read it on a bench by the Mighty Sturgeon.
