Many moons ago, a friend, my wife and I were headed to Vancouver. It was our first trip there, so we were looking forward to the newness of Lotus Land. Stopping to see my aunt in Merritt, she asked if we had our umbrellas.
"Umbrellas? We're from Saskatchewan. It's semi-arid. It doesn't rain in Saskatchewan. If it rains at home, we stay in the house," was along the lines of my response.
She replied, "You better get an umbrella."
Well, she was right. And it seems climate change had come to the prairies, because now we might need to keep an umbrella in the car, too.
I spent Sunday night clicking through the 929 pictures posted on the Facebook group "Yorkton Canada Day Flood 2010."
Wow. The city I grew up in looked like it belonged in southern Manitoba.
One guy I used to be in air cadets with posted July 4, "Looks like I have to punch a hole thru the basement floor and put a sump pump in. Hopefully that will stop the water from flowing in."
This was a couple days after he vacuumed approximately 250 gallons of water out of his basement over the course of the night. He learned the value of buying a high-quality wet/dry shop vac.
Flooding generally is not covered by home packages, according to my insurance broker. Sewer backups, water heater failures, yes. Torrential rains pouring through your basement windows, no.
She's had lots of calls.
It was good to see the premier in Yorkton the next day. He likely got a phone call from the Yorkton MLA Greg Ottenbreit saying something along the lines of, "Mr. Premier, get your butt down here, quick, please."
Ottenbreit had to rescue his own Suburban from the rising waters, according to photos posted by his wife. It even washed away their front lawn.
The Yorkton flood came on the heels of Maple Creek's flooding, which took out the TransCanada highway for a week.
A friend travelling from Preeceville to North Battleford asked me to use Google Maps to calculate the shortest route to take, since flooding had cut off two highways that he would normally use.
The level of damage is impressive, but not insurmountable. The Yorkton Public Library had water on the outside at least 18 inches deep, from photos posted online, maybe more. That means probably every book on the bottom two shelves, plus any office paperwork or computers on the ground would have been destroyed. My mom worked in that building for over 20 years until moving to the headquarters building on the edge of the city. She recalls being told of a similar flood several years before she started.
I've heard two schools of thought as to government's role should be in these incidents. One says that even the money promised is not enough, because entire farms were wiped out in the Maple Creek area.
The other tells me we've lost our resilience in the face of hard times, that our opulence has essentially made us soft. Our forefathers didn't have anyone offering a bailout if something like a flood happened. They just picked up and carried on. Having to replace gyproc is not the same as being wiped off the face of the map, as we've seen in other parts of the world.
Indeed, no one has died, and I've yet to hear of an injury. So we've been fortunate.
However, maybe Saskatchewan residents are going to have to consider buying umbrellas, and maybe some high-end wet/dry shop vacs.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
