The community of St. Albert is doing what it can to help southern Alberta municipalities recover from last month’s horrific flooding.
Besides deploying members of the RCMP, the city has also sent down one firefighter and two public works employees with some equipment.
Dan Rites, director of public works, said two staff went down to High River to help with the recovery effort there. They took with them one tandem truck and one skid steer to help haul away the mountains of mud that have inundated the community.
“I’ve been in constant contact with the fellows down there,” said Rites. “They’ve just been clearing out mud and as the water’s recessed, it’s left as much as four feet of mud in some places.”
The city plans to keep its public works members in place until next week. It might have to rotate its employees through High River in the interim.
Les Mroz, a fire prevention and safety officer with the city’s fire department, recently returned from a stint in Medicine Hat, which also suffered flood damage. He was one member of 16 different teams in the city responsible for inspecting evacuated homes.
“Predominantly it was flood-damaged basements and that includes water that was still standing at a variety of depths and water that had receded,” Mroz said. “The sludge that remained from the sewage had its own distinct odour. Without even entering a home, you had a pretty good idea it was going to be in trouble.”
The experience was unique for Mroz. The former fire chief in Peace River, he’d planned for such floods but had never experienced one. This time he was able to see a serious flood and the response to it up close.
“I’m certainly no stranger to the devastation of fire to people. It affects five or six houses at the most but not an entire block of houses,” Mroz said.
Local resident Dean Heuman also got a first-hand look at the damage in High River, and even spent the better part of a day trying to help out.
Heuman, a co-owner of Focus Communications in Edmonton, helped put together a relief convoy of supplies from different Ford dealers in the Capital region, with whom Focus works. The vehicles, packed with sheets, towels, blankets, clothing and food, left at 6 a.m. Thursday.
Once the supplies were delivered, Heuman pulled on his work gloves and approached the home of a senior citizen and offered to help.
“She hadn’t had her basement pumped out yet so we couldn’t go down there but I did help her with her garage,” said Heuman, who spent six hours helping her empty her garage of mud and boxes of belongings.
“[The garage] was full of silt and contaminated with sewage and anything that was on the ground was a complete and total write-off,” Heuman said. “There were bins all over the place and we filled up as many as we could.”
One memory that sticks in Heuman’s mind is the number of boats that were randomly scattered throughout High River. He was told most people in the community didn’t know it had a boat shop.
“There’s boats laying on the roads, in the parks and one two miles away,” he said. He also spotted a set of bleachers that had floated 200 yards from its home at the baseball diamond and ended up on top of a fence.
Heuman said he had to leave at the end of the day, but will go back if he can.
“I want to go back. I don’t know how it fits in but for sure I want to go back.”
