Sundre and it residents are in recovery mode after the Red Deer River breached its banks June 20, causing less flooding than was originally predicted.
While a state of emergency is still enacted for the municipality, town officials closed the Emergency Operations Centre Saturday and lifted the evacuation order for all those except Riverside RV Park Friday.
“Sundre dodged a bullet. We're so fortunate as a town to be basically, for lack of a better term, cleaning up minor things and fixing minor infrastructure,” said Dean Pickering, the town's chief administrative officer, yesterday morning.
“Our pumps were able to hold our infrastructures intact, our water lines are intact, our sewer lines are intact, everything is functioning,” he said.
“It could have been significantly worse.”
He said the height of the Red Deer River came within a foot of the bottom of the bridge at its peak, in the middle of the night Friday, at more than 900 cubic metres per second.
“It started to go down between 4 o'clock and 6 o'clock Friday morning and there is still overland flooding happening right now,” he said.
“There was a breach in the county and so there is still overland flooding happening from the Red Deer River that's still flowing behind the Riverside campground. There's now a new stream that wasn't there before,” he said.
He said residents of the campground used sandbags to redirect the flow so it's only flooding through a narrow portion of the campground.
On the northeast side of town, 49 households were evacuated. Another 35 were evacuated on the southeast side of town as was the entire riverside area including Tall Timber, which includes about 333 households on its own, he said.
“The road to Coyote Creek has been destroyed; there is a permanent overland flow through there now,” he said.
“It will be a while before they are able to shut down that flow coming out of the Red Deer River and fix the road.”
The flow is coming through the south end of 10th Street in town and through the south end of the Riverside campground, he said.
“Right now we're actually assessing the damage, so I really couldn't say what the damage is yet because everything is being assessed this week. There will be inspections and then we will be moving forward from there,” said Sundre mayor Annette Clews, yesterday morning.
She said she is feeling “great” now that the worst is over and that residents are back in their homes.
“The level of flooding that we experienced, thank goodness, is less than what was expected,” she said.
The declaration of a state of emergency was made by town officials after they were made aware by Alberta Environment officials that the Red Deer River was rising and was said to be bringing a volume bigger than the flood in 2005.
“Based on the information we received from Alberta Environment, the river flow from the Red Deer River is rising and it's going to possibly breach the berm between 8 o'clock tonight and 6 o'clock tomorrow morning,” said Pickering, on Thursday afternoon.
The evacuated areas were the areas that did end up flooding, including Greenwood Campground, Riverside RV Park and the east side of town.
He said Sundre was lucky to have a more than six-hour head start preparing for potential flooding, whereas other areas of the province didn't, such as Canmore, Black Diamond and High River.
“Alberta Environment notified us that there was a spike in the mountain volume of water that was coming our way, so that's why we declared the state of emergency at noon (June 20),” he said.
Members of the Sundre fire department, along with Sundre RCMP officers and the town's bylaw officer, went door to door to give residents the evacuation notice on Thursday.
Clews said residents' safety was paramount.
“We're trying to prepare people ahead of time so that we're not carrying people out of water knee-deep.”
River Valley School (RVS) and Sundre High School (SHS) were both evacuated shortly after the town declared the state of emergency on June 20.
Twenty students evacuated to the Community Learning Campus in Olds, after close to 1,000 students were picked up at the schools by their parents. Fourteen of the 20 taken to Olds were RVS students and six were SHS students.
Some students were frightened and crying as they loaded the buses outside the school. RVS student Paulson Leussink, 14, said everything happened so fast.
Grade 9 student at SHS, Nathan Kopp, said it was his first evacuation.
“In the 2005 flood, when I was little, me and my parents never evacuated the area. But this is different; we're evacuating the area. This is my first evacuation and I'm getting close to freaking out,” said Kopp.
RVS principal Rod McLein said the process was completed in less than two hours. School was cancelled Friday as well but resumed normal operations yesterday.
Town officials were not allowing pedestrians on the bridge overlooking the Red Deer River, as a safety precaution.
The state of emergency declaration caused several businesses to close their doors and forced the evacuation of the Sundre Hospital and Care Centre on Thursday evening.
