Sask. flood volunteer ‘ would do it again’
Trent Field won’t soon forget going to help a Calgary couple whose new, wheelchair accessible house was filled with brown muddy water after the flood of 2013.
“It was a beautiful house. They were two weeks from moving in. His wife was in a wheelchair and it had three feet of mud in the basement,” Field recalled this week.
“It was an emotional experience.”
One year after Field, his wife Shannon, brother Trent, and nephew Cody drove three vacuum trucks from Prince Albert to Calgary to pump basements, they’ve been invited to join recipients of their efforts at a block party in the Mission neighbourhood.
They hope to return to the areas where they spent 18- to 20-hour days working to rescue homes in the desperate days after whole communities were inundated. They saw a lot of tears. “Every time you turned around ... We met a lot of people, they didn’t know what to do,” Field recalled.
He remembers a couple with a home-based computer business. The servers were in the basement and the man had lost all the data on them.
“He was pretty emotional. We’re no better. They call us the Onion family because we’re a sentimental family,” Field said.
“There was an older guy. He’d recently lost his wife and now he’d lost his house. Pretty upset. My wife sat with him for three or four hours while there were 60 or 70 of us salvaging his house.
“It was exhausting; it was more rewarding than anything. It was a good feeling to be there doing that,” he said.
Field’s home is in Saskatoon, but he had been working in downtown Calgary when the flood shut down business.
A friend called to ask if Trent could bring his vacuum truck from Prince Albert to help his parents, who lived near the Elbow River.
Field and his kin arrived with the trucks about 30 hours after the call for help.
“We started at my buddy’s parents’ and we realized everybody needed the same amount of help. We just started going down the street, from one house to the next,” he said.
The Fields had industrial equipment that could drain a deluged basement and remove 70 centimetres of heavy mud and silt in a fraction of the time it would take ordinary consumer-grade pumps and manual labour to do the job.
Next, furniture, basement drywall and even wooden studs — all saturated breeding grounds for mould — needed to be torn down and carried out.
On that first day, the Saskatchewan group worked until 2 a.m.
It was full steam ahead for the next seven days.
On the third day, Canyon Technical, an oilfield service company, sent a fuel truck and some men to support the Field group. He estimates Canyon provided about $1,000 worth of fuel per day to keep the trucks pumping.
Also on the third day, hundreds and thousands of volunteers descended on the stricken neighbourhoods looking for ways to help.
The Field group would go into the street calling them to help with the manual labour after the trucks had removed the water and mud.
They became an increasingly efficient machine. Some people tore down walls and others formed bucket brigades to carry out debris with a speed that stunned people who otherwise might have lost their homes.
Cleaning a house took four or five hours when they began. Within days, they had the process down to two hours.
“I’m talking 70 or 80 volunteers per house. We’d have the entire basement, walls taken down and the basement gutted.”
The volunteers declined payment for jobs that would normally cost about $20,000 if done by contractors, he said.
They cleaned about 45 houses in Mission and Bowness in a week.
They stopped after a week, when a truck broke down.
“We took that as a sign. We were pretty exhausted.”
As much as they wanted to go “until the entire city was done,” they knew they had limits, he said.
Looking back, Field said he and his brother agree they would answer the call again.
“It was one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in life. It was good.
“There was talk there might be flooding again this year, and I think I’ve got a couple vac trucks somewhere. We can do it all again.”