'I didn't go home for three days': Canmore residents look back on flood 10 years later

Canmore residents remember the flood 10 years later Canmore residents look back on the frightening flood of 2013. Bill Macfarlane reports.

10 years ago, the rain began to fall over the Rockies, as three weather systems combined to dump a massive volume of water onto an already deep snow pack.

Within hours, Calgary was on alert – and the mountain communities of Canmore and Exshaw were dealing with a torrent of rock and debris knocking out roads, and tearing away houses.

Over the ensuing decade, much changed, But despite the time that passed, some memories remain as fresh as ever.

"I didn't go home for three days," said Sally Caudill, the CAO for the Town of Canmore. "And I didn't go home the second day because the road to my house washed out."

Over the span of 36 extraordinary hours, roughly 220 millimetres of rain fell on the mountains, dissolving a heavy spring snowpack and unleashing a torrent of water and debris that tore apart homes and highways.

"We understood the river," Caudill said. "But we didn't understand steep mountain creeks. So now we have an awareness of where all the creeks are and what their historic behaviour has been."

Since then, tens of millions of dollars have gone into making the Bow Valley safer in a flood – the largest project at Cougar Creek able to cut the force of a similar future event nearly in half.

PROJECTS ALMOST COMPLETE

Near the Hamlet of Exshaw, Jura, Pigeon and Hart Creek were all given reinforced banks and improved drainage to protect homes and roads – designed to handle a one-in-500-year event.

"It's estimated that the event in 2013 was a 300 year flood event," said Doug Fulford, a flood mitigation expert, "so they have been designed to meet or exceed that size of event."

The projects around Exshaw are almost complete, a remarkable accomplishment for a small municipality facing big decisions.

"And we continue to assess it where the risks remain," Alford said, continuing, "And what more can be done to mitigate those risks in other locations."

The infrastructure put in place since 2013 is important, but so is the hard-won experience of having lived through it.

"Weather monitoring, understanding who may need to be evacuated," said Caudill. "Those are all things that we didn't have formalized 10 years ago that we do now."