Now, all those paths are underwater, along with a good portion of the city. In the last 48 hours a giant storm system dumped over 200 mm of rain on Southern Alberta, melted the snow pack, swelled the Bow and the Elbow and all their tributaries, which then breached the banks and berms and flowed right down the streets of the city, flooding the downtown core, along with several neighbourhoods, closing bridges and displacing over 100 thousand people. It has been an unbelievable 2 days. The Trans Canada highway is impassible going west . Mud slides cover a portion, and Cougar Creek washed out another portion. I was glued to the television set most of yesterday watching it all. It was hard to turn away, except to dash to the grocery store for supplies.
Today, my city is still under an emergency watch as we wait for the Bow River to crest and hopefully start to recede.
This has been an surreal experience, especially since my neighbourhood, where today the sun shines, is dry.. The ground feels like a soggy wet sponge but we are high and therefore not flooded. We have been lucky here in Silver Springs.
LIVE: Return to 'normal' in downtown Calgary could take weeks or months
This shot is from the Calgary Herald.
The thing is, we are not finished yet. More rain is on the way, although not the intense rain of the past couple of days, and the city remains under emergency alert. All 14 bridges across the rivers are, if not closed, are partly closed. And the brown, silty water roars too close for comfort underneath the bridge decks.
No one has seen this kind of disaster in the Calgary area - ever. Not that we don't have floods, just not of this magnitude. The cleanup is going to take quite a while once the water levels finally go down.
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