People around the city dealt with flooding after being pounded with rain and winds on July 28. An estimated 100-150 millimetres of rain drenched the city.
Peter Bergquist, director of planning and engineering for the city, said he has no number for how many homes were affected. He did that say most of the flooding in homes was due to sewage backups.
“The reason for that was the lift stations couldn’t handle the amount of fluids coming in,” he said.
The department of public works was out in the rain trying to deal with the massive amount of water.
“To our knowledge, we received more rain this storm than the 2010 storm,” Bergquist said.
Each municipality with a wastewater system needs a permit, and there’s a provision for an emergency bypass. The City had to utilize this provision, diverting sewage into a drainage system that leads to Stoney Lake. Patrick Boyle, manager of corporate communications with the provincial Water Security Agency, said this kind of action is infrequent but becomes unavoidable in emergency situations. If the water wasn’t diverted, it could lead to the water treatment system becoming damaged or destroyed.
“That would be a far worse situation than what we’re dealing with right now,” he said.
The Water Security Agency is monitoring the situation at Stoney Lake to measure the impacts and are in touch with the City. The Saskatoon Health Region issued an advisory cautioning people against any activities in the water but this advisory has since been lifted.
Other damage included downed branches and trees tipped over, though to Bergquist’s knowledge, the damage there wasn’t that extensive. The ball diamonds at the Uniplex are flooded and were set to be drained this week.
“We wanted to wait until the water went down because that was helping us by holding back some of the storm system further,” Bergquist said.
In addition, parts of the roof at Humboldt Public School fell off, and the debris is cordoned off by caution tape.
He said 7th Ave. “was in pretty big trouble” and intersections got hit the hardest. He couldn’t say which houses were more likely to have had problems with sewer backup because he didn’t know which houses had backflow prevention.
Now, the lift stations are back to normal, though Bergquist said crews are still dealing with “a fair amount” of sump pump water going into them. The City’s super pipes were set to be drained this week because they were “100 per cent full.” The super pipes were installed to prevent sewer backups and can hold 2.1 million litres of water.
“We have the super pipes this time, which lowered the extent of damage significantly,” Bergquist said.
Ultimately, he said the crews did all they could in the conditions they had.
“We did everything in our power to prevent backups, even though they did happen. We did what we could and unfortunately some backups did happen and we had to release some water into the lake system untreated as a result,” Bergquist said. “It was the best that we could do with the systems we had available.”
