CANMORE – Worry began to grow across the Bow Valley as the rains steadily grew.
The annual monsoon June season had always left its mark on Canmore – as recent as in 2012 when flooding impacted Cougar Creek – but a steady and seemingly not ending downpour had gradually pelted the region.
In a few short hours the potential of risk changed from looking like water would be contained to hundreds of people having to be evacuated and millions of dollars in property damage ensuing.
The night and early hours of June 19, 2013, are a part of Canmore’s history that will not be forgotten.
As the annual June rains frequent the valley and the snowpacks melt high above on the mountains overlooking the area, the downpour brought a different threat than in years past.
Though they can be seen as monotonous and never-ending, for many, the rains are a form of blessing in minimizing the threat of wildfire for the region.
In less than 48 hours, millions of dollars in damage had been wrought to the towns of Banff, Canmore, MD of Bighorn, Kananaskis Country and Banff National Park, with thousands being evacuated.
The full scope of the damage and the long road to recovery wasn’t fathomed until the worst of the floods had been reigned in and the true devastation realized.
‘THE RAIN WASN’T LETTING UP’
Lisa de Soto, the long-time CAO for the Town, remembers being at an Alberta Urban Municipalities’ Association – now known as Alberta Municipalities’ – meeting with other Canmore councillors in Airdrie.
The drive back to Canmore on the Trans-Canada Highway stuck out, with the rain continuing to pelt the earth with no signs of letting up.
“Oh my goodness, this is going to get really serious. … The rain just wasn’t letting up. It was coming down and coming down. It was solid rain and didn’t stop for two days,” she said.
When arriving back in Canmore, she stopped at Cougar Creek to see it flowing, but the armour walls for flood mitigation were holding. After going home, she and her husband dropped their son Luke off at a friend’s place and went back to Cougar Creek to watch the water at the dog park with other people.
In a moment, they heard a “thump, thump, thump” as a group of trees were ripped from the earth all at once, carried down the creek and jammed into the culvert. Within minutes, everyone at the dog park was ankle deep in water but the danger was still minimal.
As Andy Esarte, the Town’s manager of engineering, was walking the different creeks, he saw the flow of water was gradually picking up. However, the bank protection for flood mitigation put in the year before was helping.
When standing at Bow Valley Trail and watching water slowly back up, water flow picking up and the culverts reaching capacity, there was a concern roads would have to be closed.
“In a very short period you go from having a sense of you understand the hazard you’re dealing with. We put protections in place you believe will protect from something similar,” he said.
“At the moment you realize you’re not dealing with that anymore and you’re dealing with something significantly different, you recognize you need to respond and something needs to be done because what’s in place isn’t working.”
When standing along Bow Valley Trail and Cougar Creek, Esarte was watching the concrete culverts that held the CP Rail tracks. Water would regularly pond at them, but an excavator would be brought in to scoop out debris and keep it clear.
The force of the water and debris on June 19 saw the culverts quickly get blocked, establishing a dam that led to a force of pressure that flushed the concrete culverts away as if they were powerless. In a moment, the continuously welded tracks were hanging mid-air with nothing supporting them.
“One second the tracks are there and the next second it’s a black void in the dark with the track and rail hanging there in the air,” he said.
“It felt very out of control. … You’re dealing with pretty immense forces doing huge and rapid damage to the channel and seeing the potential that all kinds of bad things can happen.”
‘IT WAS ALL HANDS ON DECK’
At 11 p.m., de Soto went to bed only to be woken less than an hour by a phone call from Esarte letting her know a section of the Trans-Canada Highway and CP Rail line had been breached and an emergency centre needed to be immediately set up.
“It was all hands on deck after that,” she said.
De Soto called then Mayor John Borrowman, asking him come to the Canmore fire hall at roughly 1 a.m. where Sally Caudill, now CAO but communications manager at the time, de Soto and the head of the emergency centre Greg Burt were on hand. Borrowman signed a state of emergency declaration and established the emergency command centre in council chambers at the Civic Centre.
Borrowman had only recently returned home after dropping his son at Calgary International Airport in the evening for him to fly back to Australia. While coming home on the Trans-Canada Highway, he remembers the rain sticking out.
“It really is raining hard and it was the first time it registered, but I didn’t think much of it,” he said.
When he arrived at the fire hall, Borrowman signed the state of emergency – a declaration he had to do every day for at least five days – an act rarely done in municipal politics.
“It was a very real moment. It was outside of my expectations,” he said. “It’s not really something that came up much in the pottery world.”
At the Civic Centre, Caudill was updating the Town’s social media accounts to inform residents. She wouldn’t leave the Civic Centre for three-and-a-half days, sleeping on a cot.
As the emergency centre began its early operations, Esarte came into council chambers with a stark call to begin evacuations.
“He was soaked and his eyes were huge and he said ‘we have to evacuate’ and I couldn’t compute what he was saying,” Caudill said. “I didn’t understand and I started getting texts from my husband saying the road was gone. I thought he meant a road, not the highway, and it took a long time to fully comprehend.
“It hit me he was genuinely fearful of the well-being of people and it hadn’t hit me that was the risk. We worried about property, but the idea of people being in harm's way is an unforgettable moment. … When I saw him, I knew we couldn’t question it and we just had to believe it.”
‘IT WAS CONTROLLED BEDLAM’
The emergency command centre became a hub for all operations in the community.
It grew to include several Town staff taking on specific emergency roles, firefighters, police, a provincial disaster expert and Canadian Armed Forces personnel who took over the mayor’s office.
In the initial days of the emergency centre, despite controlling all operations, few people on site were able to survey the initial damage as they were coordinating the response without sleep roughly 36 hours straight.
“I remember a moment where we all lifted our heads up … One of the people had photos from Facebook and we started to look at it. The extent of the damage, it caught us. A number of us were crying and it was overwhelming the impact,” de Soto said.
A call centre was originally set up in council chambers, but moved to the second floor when the constant ringing began driving people crazy.
Residents were also calling, not only to find out what was happening, but offering to provide any help they could.
Caudill said she regularly emailed staff with updates, updated the Town’s social media accounts and website. and gave Rob Murray at Mountain FM and other media information. During the worst of the flood, the website was being updated every 30 minutes, even if there was no information so people wouldn’t assume the worst.
Caudill, whose own home was flooded and had her daughter stuck in Calgary when the highway was cut, said the emergency centre showed how well people could work with one another in a time of crisis.
“People lost their homes, valuable possessions and there was a real sense of lift and care for each other. That’s what I remember the most,” she said. “A lot of people just figured out what needed to be done and did it. … There was zero ego, it was just how can I help.
“There’s a lot of memories and most of them are really good. I’m really proud of the people I worked with. We’ve learned a lot.”
Esarte highlighted the stress in the room, with decisions having to be made in seconds that could’ve had an impact on human lives.
“We were having to make those decisions in real time. I remember those being really stressful and very difficult. … It was high tension, high stress and an enormous sense of relief when people were out of harm’s way.”
In normal circumstances, elected officials aren’t allowed in the emergency centre, rather getting out of the way as situations arise and need quick answers.
Borrowman said when the provincial emergency management specialist arrived and was introduced to everyone, one of the first things the specialist said was to get the former mayor out of the room.
He was ultimately allowed to stay – including sleeping in the Civic Centre – after Greg Burt interceded and became a spokesperson with media calls coming in droves.
“It was controlled bedlam,” he said of the emergency centre. “In the moment, you trust the people who have been trained to deal with it and hoping the rain stopped.”
“All my memories are about people and how they came together and responded, particularly our emergency management people … Everybody came together and there were no egos.”
Though plans can be created for years, the saying no plan survives first contact with the enemy rang true.
“You create plans, but what actually happens is different and you use the plan to react. … When you’re not in it, it’s hard to imagine the full damage,” Caudill said.
“We got really good at structure. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast and there was so much happening it felt like you had to go fast, but we got good at figuring out when to go slow, when to go fast and methodically hear from everybody.”
‘IT’S NOT THE WORST EVENT THAT COULD HAPPEN’
The Bow Valley had more than seen its fare share of flooding.
In 2012, flooding had roared down Cougar Creek, leaving minor damage and flood mitigation was completed that was ultimately washed away in a matter of hours in 2013.
Esarte noted flooding historically took place throughout the 1960s and 1970s that led to a berming system being built by the province. Cougar Creek had been channelled in the 1960s, but only had basic mitigation such as riprap.
A dam that was established in the 1980s was washed out in the early 1990s, but a comprehensive mitigation plan had never been completed.
In Canmore, the ongoing work to offer flood mitigation continues.
The Town annually runs a seasonal high water monitoring system and close attention is paid towards the snowpack levels as spring shifts into winter. Weather equipment notably sits on top of the Civic Centre and near Cougar Creek, while Town policies such as the land use bylaw and Municipal Development Plan were updated for steep creeks.
The Cougar Creek flood mitigation project, however, is significantly behind by two-and-a-half years due to issues with Flatiron Constructors Canada Ltd. The Town filed a notice of default and the two came to a negotiated contract termination earlier this year.
Esarte said immediately after the worst of the floods stopped, efforts to understand what and how it happened began.
In 2013, several storms converged and parked over the valley that led to a high amount of rain in an extended amount of time.
“We didn’t have a great understanding at the time of how rainfall amounts would correlate to runoff on the creek,” he said. “We thought if it rained a lot, the creek would flow a lot and see something similar to 2012.”
How quickly everything took place also stuck with Esarte. He had come back to Canmore from Calgary at 5 p.m. to see a dry Cougar Creek. By 9 p.m., water was flowing similar to 2012, which led to the situation unravelling before midnight.
Throughout the course of those immediate days, roughly 270 millimetres of rain poured onto the region. The forecast called for 150 millimetres – almost half – combined with about a metre of snow melting, which added significantly more water to the mix.
Creeks that were previously small, dry or faced minimal threat – Cougar, Pigeon, Stoneworks, Stone, Echo Canyon and Three Sisters creeks – all entered the Canmore lexicon.
Tens of millions have been spent and 10s of millions more will be earmarked for projects to mitigate the catastrophic disaster the 2013 floods brought.
In the weeks following the floods, several studies were approved by council and the immediate work of flood mitigation started. What became evident was flooding events would continue and a more permanent mitigation plan was needed.
“It’s not the worst event that could happen on Cougar Creek. Not even by a long shot and that’s why getting mitigation done is important,” he said.
“It’s a really challenging creek and it’s part of our fabric now. It’s something we’ll have to deal with for generations to come. This mitigation gives us the best opportunity to minimize impacts on the community and give us time to move people out of harm's way.”
‘THE DAMAGE WAS MONUMENTAL’
By June 21, the sun came out and the flooding began to gradually recede.
That same day, de Soto and Borrowman were able to get in a helicopter to survey the damage. Taking off from Lawrence Grassi Middle School, since the heliport was shutdown, their flight path took them over Stewart Creek, Stone Creek, Cougar Creek, the Bow River and Dead Man’s Flats.
As they flew over the areas, the difference in the landscape from June 18 to only 72 hours later was a stark reminder of the power of nature.
De Soto remembers sitting with Reid Costley, an engineer and former owner of Cascade Engineering and talking about how people were surveying the damage, marking homes with red, yellow and green paint to determine if they were still habitable.
“The damage was monumental,” de Soto said.
“The number of creeks, the amount of damage and the starkness of the muddy dirty water on the landscape, you really take stock of what an immense event it was.”
Borrowman said flying up Cougar Creek at a low level showcased the damage, erosion of banks and where houses were on the brink of collapse.
He compared it to images of the bayou in Louisiana where trees and bushes sprout up out of the water.
“In my years on council, I got through fire, floods and pestilence,” he said. “We were lucky. It could’ve been very different.”
After landing, de Soto remembers speaking to a geologist who said the amount of debris from Cougar Creek was “quasi-infinite.”
“There’s so much dirt, tree and rock that could come down. It’s something to hear or read about it,” she said. “It’s another thing to see it.”
The province began throwing money at recovery efforts, but it was evident that a return to normal wouldn’t be measured in days or weeks, but years.
“I remember thinking this is going to be a long haul,” de Soto said. “This is what we’re going to be doing for the next 10 years. It was evident that everything else we were doing was going to be put on hold and this was going to be the thing for the foreseeable future.”
‘IT WAS THE BEST CANADA DAY EVER’
As a time honoured tradition in Canmore, there was little doubt the popular and well attended Canada Day parade would take place.
Through it all, there remain images of endearment for those who remember the immediate aftermath.
The Canada Day parade continued only a few short days from the worst of the floods and recovery had been ongoing.
A little more than a week after the floods devasted the region, the celebration offered not only a relief but also a chance to recognize everyone who worked countless hours.
De Soto remembers asking as many Town staff as possible to attend, but also having the countless contractors who risked their own safety to protect further flooding.
“We needed to have the big heavy iron in the parade,” she said. “All of those equipment operators, they need to be celebrated in the parade.”
With more than 60 municipal staff taking part in the parade, de Soto called it one of her career highlights.
“The whole crowd gave standing ovations,” she said. “As a municipal employee you don’t get that, so it was a moment of pride and relief the community was behind everyone despite all the damage and destruction. … It was something special.”
For Caudill, she had only become a Canadian citizen that year and Borrowman asked her to carry the Canadian flag.
She remembers walking next to former long-time Town planner Alaric Fish who jokingly told her “this is not going to last forever, so enjoy it.”
“It was really an honour and memorable to have that response from the community,” she said. “The volume of the sound from people cheering intensified. It was extremely emotional.”
Borrowman, who moved to Canmore in the 1970s and has seen countless Canada Days, said it was easy to rank the 2013 event.
“It was the best Canada Day parade ever. It was awesome,” he said. “We made a conscious decision and we had just come through the floods, so we should be celebrating. … People were weeping on Main Street when the heavy equipment went through. It was a very emotional time.”
Despite the damage and devastation wrought on the community, it also highlighted the ability of people to come together and help one another.
“The reason it’s such an iconic time for those who lived through it is that’s it’s big events like that that draw community together. It brings out the best in people,” de Soto said. “While there may be disputes between neighbours or people, the entire community came together. … It was really a time that brought out the best in people.”
