Another month, another flood for Eston area

ESTON — The sights and sounds around Eston less than 72 hours after the latest torrential downpour of rain to hit the town?

“You wouldn’t know it happened if you came here today,” Donnie Hartsook, the town’s utilities director, told SaskToday on Tuesday afternoon.

Hartsook said he worked “pretty much side by side” with Eston public works director Dayton McIvor until about 2 a.m. Sunday, doing their best to ensure the town’s septic system kept up to the task at hand.

“Our sewer system was pumping hard that night and was getting real full but we had both pumps running obviously all night and all day the next day, and now things have caught up on the sewer side,” added McIvor, who estimated the town received three-and-a-half inches of rain (about nine centimetres) in around 40 minutes on Saturday.

(Environment Canada reported accumulations of up to 100 millimetres or four inches in some locations.)

Social media posts showed a variety of reactions to the event, including from some residents who took to the streets in canoes and kayaks.

Others had more serious matters to work through, including one resident who told SaskToday the storm left her mother’s basement with a one-foot deep pool of water in it.

McIvor said most of the remaining work for town crews as of Tuesday morning involved cleaning up mud that had flowed from alleys and yards onto some lower-elevation roads, and pumping excess water out of a stormwater collection lake on the southeast corner of the town’s current development area.

Golf course access washed out

The weekend storm came on the heels of a June deluge that dumped an estimated two inches of rain on the townsite but double that on Eston Riverside Regional Park, 23 kilometres south.

Lorie Poulter manages the clubhouse for the park’s nine-hole golf course and recalled that downpour leaving the 2nd, 5th, 6th and 7th holes under water.

The June rain also washed out the access road in and out of the park and caused flooding in several cabins in the park’s lower-laying areas, though Poulter noted that the campground was left largely unscathed.

Poulter credited the RM of Snipe Lake for its quick response in rebuilding the park’s access road, allowing residents and the golf course alike to begin the process of assessing and repairing the damage, with the golf course re-opening under a week after the first of the heavy rains.

She added that this past weekend’s storm dropped a comparatively scant seven-tenths of an inch of rain on the park, though the saturated ground is now causing other concerns as well.

“With all the water we’ve had the trees lose their root system,” she said. “(We’ve lost) three or four in the park now at least, and they’re not little trees, but fortunately they’ve fallen in really good places.”

Rainfall data

Through July 14, volunteer data provided to and shared by Saskatchewan's Ministry of Agriculture showed between 146 and 199 millimetres (approximately 6-8 inches) of rain had fallen in the RM of Snipe Lake - which encompasses Eston and the park - since April 1.

Combined with this past weekend's precipitation, some parts of the region have now received an estimated 250-300 mm of rain since the start of April, roughly equalling last year's entire reported totals in the RM.

The ministry's year-end crop report for 2023 showed 173 mm of rain fell in Snipe Lake for the year, while the neighbouring RM of Lacadena received 154 mm for all of 2022 and 111 mm in 2021.