Flooding improves in Saskatchewan, but handful of communities still in emergency

REGINA — Floodwater started to recede in Saskatchewan communities Wednesday, following widespread, heavy rain that forced about 400 people from their homes.

“Things are improving across the province,” emergency management commissioner Duane McKay said Wednesday.

“The rains in most of the province are beginning to tail off, which means that a lot of the run-off is beginning to move through the affected areas. We do expect weather to clear and that’s encouraging.”

McKay warned there could still be isolated thunderstorms over the next few days.

“This will be important for us to continue to plan around for flooding,” he said.

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“We’re hoping that we won’t see the accumulations or the precipitation amounts that we’ve seen over the last couple of days.”

Rainfall warnings were in place Monday and Tuesday from the southwest corner of Saskatchewan through to the northeast.

The warnings finally ended Wednesday, but in the wake of the storm, five communities declared states of emergency: the city of Estevan, the towns of Carrot River and Arborfield, the Rural Municipality of Arborfield and the Shoal Lake Cree Nation.

McKay said things improved “substantially” in Estevan, where storm sewers were unable to keep up with at least 130 millimetres of rain that fell in just over two hours on Sunday. The city lifted its state of emergency Wednesday afternoon.

“We should see a lot of the water that has accumulated in streets, in low areas, and unfortunately in some houses, start to move out,” said McKay.

About 400 people who live in Arborfield were ordered to leave their homes Tuesday after a road holding back water gave way, sending a flood toward the community.

McKay said provincial crews were in Arborfield to help. The evacuation order was partially lifted Wednesday.

“Things are progressing there and certainly with the water flows beginning to mitigate in that particular area, plans will be undertaken to get people back into their homes and start looking at some of the damage that might have been caused there,” he said.

Sandra Ralph was one of the people forced out.

“We could see the water coming. It filled our basement,” she told Prince Albert radio station CKBI.

Ralph’s son is to get married this weekend and they had to move the venue to a farm on a hill.  

“This is a town of survivors,” she said.

The Saskatchewan Water Security Agency said some areas in the northeast received more than 100 millimetres of rain over two days.

“Certainly a large, intensity or amount of rainfall in a very short period of time,” said agency spokesman Patrick Boyle.

“That area itself, even going into this event, was fairly saturated and had significant precipitation in the nine days previous to this, so when that happens … there’s no storage on the landscape, so a lot of that runs off pretty quickly into what would be the tributaries.”

One of those streams, Burntout Brook, flows through to Arborfield and hit record levels. It was approximately one-in-200 year flows, said Boyle.

Downstream in Manitoba, a high water warning was issued Wednesday for the Red Deer River. The river, just north of the Porcupine Provincial Forest, flows from Saskatchewan into Manitoba.

The Manitoba government also said no widespread flooding is expected, but localized, intense rainfall could create overland flooding in some areas.

Jennifer Graham, The Canadian Press