Residents pumping basements in Exshaw, Alta., due to flooding

The basements of some homes in Exshaw are still flooded after heavy rainfall caused the Bow River's water levels to rise late last month.

A look up and down Mt Mcgillivary Drive in Exshaw, Alta., on Monday afternoon shows several homes pumping water out of their flooded basements.

Kelly Suchan’s basement was several inches deep and six at its highest when began seeping in as heavy rainfall pummeled the area on May 31.

“It’s unbelievable like no sleep,” Suchan said. “I was lucky I was on top of it real quicky.”

Suchan is among many of the residents in the Alberta hamlet experiencing flooding after heavy rainfall in late May caused the levels of the Bow River to rise.

He has eight pumps going to get the water out of his unit. His basement flooded in 2013 and 2020 and says he will be pumping water out for weeks.

Clifford Hansen, Suchan’s next-door neighbour, says his basement was over 10 centimetres deep on Monday which also flooded during those same years.

“It’s very frustrating,” Hansen said. “There’s a lot of groundwater, and, the groundwater level comes right to the surface of the Earth, and it flows in the walls. It flows in through the floor from the outside.”

Hansen has done remediation work to his unit, putting in a sump pump and ducting in the floor, but said the water is coming in too quickly to keep his home dry.

Down the street, Brian Thompson has around 20 centimetres of water in the basement of the home he’s lived in for 33 years.

“This is ridiculous,” Thompson said of the flooding.

“Some years I’d have a little bit of water came down here. In 33 years, I’d say 1991, 1998, 2005 were the worst incidents and none of them were even close to this or 2020.”

He, Suchan and Hansen point to the nearby Exshaw Creek and catchment pond as to blame for pushing ground water into the basements.

There was flood mitigation work done on the Exshaw Creek after the 2013 flood, but a Matrix Solutions report gave Hansen and other residents minimal confidence in the mitigation work.

“The mitigation project opened up the creek bed. They didn’t do anything to mitigate the mitigation, so here we are,” said Hansen. “We need to get something done to this creek and it’s obvious.”

In a statement to CTV News, the Municipal District of Bighorn, which oversees the hamlet, says the groundwater levels are elevated from the snowpack melting along with the excessive rain.

The municipal district said the catchment pond was build to slow the flow from the creek, and pointed to a 2023 Matrix Solutions report that said the pond did not increase groundwater levels.

“In summary, the simulated groundwater levels predicted by the study with and without the sediment pond suggest that the sediment pond does not significantly increase the groundwater levels experienced within the hamlet, and in particular in the area of observed groundwater flooding,” the district wrote.