A public works employee who has returned from working in High River said the experience has made him thankful for what he has.
Derek Benson, a team lead with the city’s public works department, spent six days with another public works staffer helping clear the flood-stricken town of mud. That pair was spelled off last week by two other workers who will return this week.
“What an experience,” Benson said. “It’s in a good way that you could help out, let alone seeing the devastation. You think how good you have it when you’re in a situation like that. And you feel bad for the people who have nothing left with no insurance.”
The St. Albert workers took down with them a skid steer and a tandem truck which they used to help haul away all of the mud that has inundated the town. Benson’s shortest day in High River was 10 hours, the longest more than 15.
“When we got there, there were RCMP blocking every entrance and you couldn’t get into any entrance without your name at the gate,” said Benson. “They weren’t letting anybody in if you weren’t there to work.”
Along with crews from Strathcona County, Slave Lake, Fort Saskatchewan and Chestermere, Benson was there to relieve the High River crews who he said were approaching burnout.
“They were working too many hours trying to do their work and that’s one of the reasons a few municipalities got together and sent people down,” Benson said.
During his time there, he said there was still water in many areas. He said crews there were pumping out 110 million gallons of water a day.
“That’s one Olympic swimming pool every six minutes,” he said.
Some neighbourhoods were still only accessible by boat. High River was like a ghost town, he said, save for locksmiths that were going house-to-house, opening houses so authorities could look for pets or people.
“There’s still an area where they are going in by boat to check on homes to this day,” said Benson. “There are areas we couldn’t get to because of that.”
Washed-out bridges meant Benson and other workers had to sometimes take longer detours to get to where they needed to go. The conditions in which they worked also varied. Sometimes an area they were assigned to clean up was too wet, so they would go work in a drier spot until the first area was dry.
“There were all kinds of little setbacks for different things. You do as much as you can get done in a day and then you look forward to the next day.”
St. Albert also contributed RCMP officers in the wake of last month’s flooding, and sent a safety code officer down to Medicine Hat to help with flooding there.
