EMERGENCY ALERT: Flash flood alert for High River has just been on the TV and radio airwaves. #ABstorm #ABflood
— News Talk 770 (@NewsTalk770) June 20, 2013
From Calgary’s mayor:
Major risk of flooding in Calgary. Follow directions here: http://t.co/7dLx8aZptf and stay tuned. Please RT widely. #YYC
— Naheed Nenshi (@nenshi) June 20, 2013
Picture from twitter.
We warned you not to vote for Redford, now look what she’s done.
Seek higher ground. Stay safe!
There goes the whitefish season
Hot and Sunny all weekend says the weatherman.
Yeah and they said it was supposed to be sunny and nice on Monday too. But it was overcast and raining again where my sister lives(Grande Prairie). I think she said they were at 21 days of rain now when I was talking to her on Saturday.
Remember this was suppose to be a hot summer? My furnace kicked in today.
Shades of the 2005 flood, only they think it will be worse than that. Downtown Calgary is caught in the cross hairs, especially at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. Even Sunnyside is under evacuation order, as well as parts of Bowness. All the older parts of surrounding area towns are under water as I type. Bragg Creek, west of Calgary is…..well, a river runs through it. Expect to peak sometime post midnight.
My brother and sister in law live in Canmore. They have been evacuated from their house to a local hotel.
I’m pretty close to the Elbow.
About a 1/2 hour ago some 2 dozen cop cars went by and the sirens have been going non-stop for at least an hour. I’ve got my fingers crossed,but am not very hopeful that I will spend the night at home.
Shades of the 2005 flood, only this time we are warned it could be twice as bad. Parts of downtown Calgary are under evacuation order along the Bow and Elbow Rivers and most of the older parts of surrounding towns are under water, as I type. Expecting the peak around midnight. Bragg Creek, about 20 minutes west of me….well, a river runs through it. Still expecting more rain along the foothills feeding these rivers.
High and dry here in Huntington Hills if you need a place to evacuate to wally.
My brother lives in the downtown of canmore. Cougar creek is a disaster, houses about to fall into it. The bridge is out, the 1A is out. Evacuations from Cougar Creek have started. There is no road to calgary right now. If the upper dam of the Cougar creek goes, well see ya later. Cell towers not working either. 3 more days of rain possibly.
Thanks syncrodox,the ‘hills’ better be high and dry.
But I have already made arrangements.
I just took a walk around the ‘hood. The stores are closed,there is a city bus outside the Alpha House(detox/drunk center), other than that everything appears normal.
“High streamflow advisories”.
Now tell me, how dry is that warning? Why not “expect flooding in low lying areas and adjacent to local rivers and streams, downstream out along the Rocky Mountain Foothills, from Highway 3 north to Rocky Mountain House. Prepare to evacuate at short notice”. Might get people a bit more motivated last night, rather than the expressions of: “It hit so fast”, “no warnings” we were treated to on the local news today. It only rained all night long here in Calgary to the tune of 50-70 mm.
I watched this up past midnight on the Strathmore weather radar. It was impressive! Bands of thunderstorms and high rain sweeping east to west from Medicine Hat to the foothills. Alberta’s emergency warning system had only “high streamflow advisories” for expected 100+ mm rainfalls along the foothills. Oh, and a couple of tornado warnings for vacant areas of SE Alberta. What comes down out past Priddis Greens is gonna rip past your windows in Elbow Park in a few hours. Bragg Creek is a good example of what you can expect!
Our Mayor, Mr Nenshi is in Toronto right now, on our dime, yucking it up with “coke” jokes to the admiring downtown crowd. He could work off a few pounds stuffing sandbags in your area, Wally. Good luck, but if you haven’t left yet, I’d get moving real quick.
Right on Wally. Glad to here you’ve got things under control. My offer of accommodation stands to any other SDAer’s in Calgary who are affected by the evacuation orders. I’m on standby to go help an elderly friend who lives in Deer Run, right on Fish Creek park if the river keeps rising. Talked to him about an hour ago and the water is almost at the high water mark of the 2005 flood. As an aside, it appears our $50 million pedestrian clusterf#%k of a bridge is now in jeopardy.
All the best to those in the path of these waters.
I’ll start to worry when they put out an advisory to evacuate Nose Hill park…
Druh’s folly may end up in the river. Water up to abutments at each end. Maybe 5′ clear under. High crest at midnight. or later. very dark towards foothills.
Center St bridge lower deck under water.
Dump trucks reinforcing river bank along Memorial Drive and under pedestrian bridge to Prince’s Island, which is mostly under water.
Weir and River Run under water.
Could be a mess come daylight.
I live in Bowness and had several cops come by and say we had to get out now, no time to pack bags just leave now. Of course after we left we heard on the radio we should prepare for 72 hours away from home before leaving and we have only the clothes on our back, thanks officer. Just to make it more interesting my wife is supposed to too get induced? tomorrow and have our third child, I joked we should name her Storm.
We’re hiding from the cops. According to the city website evacuation map for my district, the evacuation zone runs up the middle of the street in front of my house and the corner is one house away from me, so we’re in the corner away from the river. My friends across the street don’t have to go anywhere. I joked with the guy next door that we should just park our cars across the street and sit in them. We did loaded the car with sleeping bags and toothbrushes and moved some stuff out of the basement and now we’re hiding, my girls are sleeping on the second floor. The rules are (a) don’t show any lights, (b) no-one goes out walking around in case they get tasered or something…
OK OK that’s not fair, Calgary has the best cops in the world. It’s true, the best.
That the flooding is over such a large area is amazing news to me.
My cousin lives on Woodfield Dr. in Calgary. Hope that is in a high dry area.
Kevanywhere, hope everything goes well for you, your wife and family. What a spot to be in.
And you’re not there rooting for the river?
The police are now telling the residents of Calgary that if they leave their homes as they are instructed, the residents should put an “X” on the door to show that there is nobody inside.
Sure hope the looters don’t get mobilized and take advantage…but scumbags who loot thrive on these situations. Shoot to kill is legal in Canada if they are caught looting, right? Or do they just get a very stern talking to? I can’t remember…
S. Central BC has also had dismal weather and I had to dig out my umbrella this morning. I left Vancouver because I hate rain and I guess my plans to move to sunnier Alberta are on hold. This is the first that I’ve heard that the same dismal conditions exist in Alberta.
Not sure what is going on with the Alberta weather. In 2010 spent a July weekend in the Kananaskis and there was just one semi-sunny day during which climbed Mount Indefatigable. Got the expected snow at the top but the remainder of the weekend was spend driving hundreds of miles in the rain trying to find a sunny spot.
While I don’t like to see large parts of Calgary underwater, it’s what one gets when one builds houses on a flood plain without some form of river flow controls (just mentioning that concept will cause some watermelons to stroke out as a result). My father would always look for the highest point in whatever city we lived in and thus, in Winnipeg, it was River Heights and in Calgary it was University Heights. I’ve carried on this family tradition and like to have at least 200′ of altitude above the nearest river and preferably more. The only way that I’d live beside a river would be if there was an extensive network of dams and water spillways to deal with the inevitable floods that will happen in a system where the time series of water height vs time observes 1/f scaling properties.
By letting rivers “run free”, one has a situation where immense damage is caused to peoples property and gigawatts of potential hydroelectric power are wasted. I suspect that if the currently out of control rivers in Alberta were all tamed, they would produce an order of magnitude more power in a week than all of the bird blenders in the country do in a year. Also, they’d provide a reliable source of irrigation water for drought years.
I’ve seen nothing on the news about the railways. Are the CP and CN tracks through the Rockies operable?
How true.
Our small town has two dams on its small river and a couple more in the area which were operated by the local electric company. We had cheaper electricity rates than Ont. Hydro and in the big blackout of Nov. 9, 1965, when over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles were left without electricity for up to 13 hours, we were the only spot with electricity. Why is that power source being wasted?
As Loki says, it’s a way to provide more electricity than the high eyesores the government is sponsoring.
If so many people weren’t affected I would be down there to watch that $50 million abortion go bobbing down the Bow… As it stands now even the Deerfoot is closed, no traffic allowed across the CalfsRobe Bridge.
How do you spend 50 million on something that looks like a PVC culvert? Public works projects are such a joy for the avant-garde.
Yeah well it’s not just the fools building on flood plains and vulnerable sea-coast.
Globally nearly all urban areas are associated with rivers….basically accidents waiting to occur…..Sandy, Katrina, St Louis, Pittsburg, Winnipeg, now Calgary…ad nauseum.
Where once the reason was transport…now it’s water supply and waste management…..like waddaya do?
Tain’t right, tain’t wrong…just is…