CALGARY FLOODS

There has been a longstanding and very welcome history of contributions from Western Canada.

Not sure if we have any who are currently based in downtown Calgary but here's hoping none have been seriously affected by the recent floods

The bases in Calgary have been shut down for quite a few years. But military assistance is coming from Edmonton and the reserves in Calgary. I spoke to an old RC Sigs buddy yesterday who lives just outside of Calgary, he's seeing water where he never saw it before. Very grim, around 100,000 displaced people.

Is Camp Wainright still going?...

Wilf wrote:

Is Camp Wainright still going?...

It should be. It hasn't been mentioned on the news, as part of the problem Mind you, there'd be lots of folks who wouldn't miss it. Including some former German P.O.W.s who were locked up there. Wainwrights original mission was a WW 2 POW camp.

I have very fond memories of Camp Wainwright. (Apart from the Khaki Trail!)

One thing I don't miss about the army is being in Wainwright in the summer or winter.

Wainwright was the first (And only) place I ever visited where males and females were billeted in the same block. OK not in the same rooms but even so...I walked into a block and the first thing I saw was a girl in a dressing gown wrapping a towel around her head as she came out of the showers. I thought hey-ho party time, sadly not so. It was a mixed block! How very Avant-garde. I appreciate these days that may seem fairly unremarkable but when you were used 1970's & 1980's British Barracks in the UK & Germany, mixed sex blocks were something of a novelty to say the least.

haven't been in the group for a while....even had to reset my password because my poor old brain couldn't for the life of me remember what the original one was!!

I am in Calgary and, luckily, live in a neighbourhood that escaped the devastation...at least the part of the neighbourhood I am in. My 'old neighbourhood' downtown was not as lucky!!

It is surreal here....as I said, where we are all things are normal....the sun is out (finally!!), the birds are singing, and you can't tell anything is amiss and yet a matter of a few blocks away is total devastation....houses off their foundations, flood water up over the first storey, everything ruined.

Over 100,000 people have been displaced as a result of this flood....unreal! Parts of the city, including downtown and some of the residential areas around it, are under 3 metres of water -- or were.

Our provincial gov't has already pledged an initial $1 billion to the relief and restoration effort...and believe me, as appreciated as that is, it's going to be a piss in the ocean. We are already hearing things like 'a ten year recovery plan'....ten years???? Oh my gawd.....

Whole swatches of the city were flooded....and I mean seriously flooded. Cars overturned. Houses pushed off their foundations. Municipal rail lines twisted and ripped out of their beddings. A major thoroughfare from the southern outskirts of the city into downtown (Macleod Trail) destroyed... at least parts of the northbound lanes were. It looks like an earthquake hit it. The Saddledome, which is a major city arena and a landmark, was flooded up to the 8th or 10th row. Archival artifacts such as team photos and trophies and such destroyed. There is talk now of houses being demolished because they are filling with mold and uninhabitable...not just one or two houses here and there, but entire streets of houses. Heart wrenching.

We were lucky in a sense, though. We in Calgary only had one death as a direct result of the flooding. An 80-year old lady in one of the older innercity neighbourhoods got trapped in her basement suite before she was able to comply with the mandatory evacuation order and drowned.

A town south of here, named High River, is completely destroyed and had 3 deaths.

we also were lucky in that we had minimal looting. Some, but not much. The police and RCMP and army (of course!) did an amazing job of securing and patrolling evacuated areas but of course they cannot be everywhere all the time and it was sadly inevitable that some low-life assholes would take advantage of other folks' devastation and just go around helping themselves to whatever. They're damned lucky they weren't shot on sight!!

A call went out over social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) for 600 volunteers to show up at a local stadium to assist and they had something like 1300 or 1400 show up!!! Damn amazing.

Those restaurants and cafes not affected, or not seriously affected, by flood waters did up food and bottled water for volunteers and handed it all out free.

All pretty amazing but really not that surprising. For all my ambivalence about Calgary (and I've lived here since 1974) and grumblings about it, the volunteer spirit here is damn high -- always has been. We are now a city of over 1 million people and along with that is a certain level of asshole-ness, but when the chips are down and Calgarians need to rally around each other and for each other, they do!

How we as a city and as individuals will recover from this, I don't know. Insurance companies largely do NOT cover natural flooding (!!!!!???) but some have come forward and said they will 'work something out' for those affected. Many renters -- and in the downtown core and inner city most properties are rental -- didn't have household insurance and lost everything....everything!!! Whole families literally have nothing now but the clothes on their back and what few possessions they might have been able to grab before being forced out and/or evacuated.

They said "it's just stuff and stuff can be replaced" and while that is true, until you've lost everything -- family photos, items that are family heirlooms, things that were yours for 20, 30, 40 years and hold a history for you -- until you've lost that, you have no idea how traumatic and devastating it is. And 1/3 of our city is traumatized and devastated directly by such losses, to say nothing of the feelings of utter hopelessness upon returning to your home and finding it filled with filthy water and mud up to the rafters and how in hell are you ever going to clean it all out...and where do you even begin to??

It's like being in a Third World country around here right now. Really really bad......

Sounds really bad Stephen, living here in China I have seen many such events first hand and it is heartbreaking to say the least. Fortunately in your floods not many people were killed, look at India just now, in their floods thousands have died and thousands more are missing.

Mother nature can strike anywhere anytime.

That she can, the raving bitch!!  

Yes, in times like these I suppose one does need to count one's blessings....at least our infrastructure is (was!) somewhat solid so we didn't have things like buildings collapsing or typhus spreading... although we have now been warned that due to heavy rain, stagnant pools of water, and subsequent warm temperatures, Calgary is about to experience a mosquito infestation like we've never seen... and we have enough hassle with the little bloodsuckers each summer as it is!! Lovely.... quick, Madge, haul out the gin and tonic, the skeeters are a-comin', woman!!