Daily Planet dissects High River flooding
In an upcoming sequence of The Daily Planet’s Dissecting Disaster week, respected hydrologist John Pomeroy is shown zooming above Kananaskis in a helicopter surveying damaged trails, washed out bridges and the scarred landscape caused by Alberta’s massive June flooding.
It’s a fairly action-packed sequence, particularly for one involving a balding, soft-spoken scientist who studies water.
But if the folks behind Discovery Channel’s celebration of all-thing scientific had their way, people like Pomeroy and others who work tirelessly to provide a post-mortem after a devastating disaster would always be viewed as heroic.
“The scientists aren’t there pulling someone out of burning building, but they are saving lives perhaps on an even larger scale than the first responders,” says Daniel Riskin, the Edmonton-born evolutionary biologist who co-hosts Daily Planet with Ziya Tong.
“And yet we don’t see them as heroes. And as a scientist, I’m partial to trying to help people see that and I think Daily Planet does a good job of showing that. These aren’t just boring people in lab coats that are tinkering away at pointless things. They are actively trying to help people’s lives stay better. Certainly all of southern Alberta is doing some real soul-searching about where to build homes, how to prepare for the next one. Those answers are coming from people like John Pomeroy.”
The devastating Alberta floods will be just one of the harrowing calamities Daily Planet will be investigating for the kickoff of its 19th season, a weeklong look at both natural and man-made disasters and how we respond to them.
It’s a response to what has seemed like an unusually high number of extreme weather and other disasters over the summer, including the train tragedy in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec and tornadoes in the U.S.
Alberta’s water-soaked drama starts things off on Monday with a look at the science behind recovery efforts in High River, zeroing in on Canadian Dewatering’s attempt to pump flood water out of the devastated town.
The Pomeroy segment will run Sept. 3, closing off a week that will also cover the science behind tornado shelters in Oklahoma, the forensics of train crashes, groundbreaking volcano research on Indonesia’s
Daily Planet’s Dissecting Disaster Week begins Monday on the Discovery Channel. The segment on High River will run on Monday. The segment on studying the flood in the Rockies will
air Sept. 3.
Krakatoa and how squads in Hamburg, Germany are still dealing with underwater bombs left over from the Second World War.
Obviously, the flood prevention and High River episodes should generate the most interest here in Alberta. John Pomeroy will be familiar to those who have followed coverage of the flooding in Alberta. The Canada research chair in Water Resources from the University of Saskatchewan, Pomeroy and his staff man a weather station in Kananaskis Country. He has been vocal in suggesting that Alberta needs to improve its flood forecasting system, a sentiment he echoes on the Daily Planet.
“What they do is they create the computer models for the weather services and the flood predictors to use to determine when a flood may be imminent,” says producer Kelly Peckham, who oversaw both Alberta segments for Daily Planet.
“As he says in the piece, if they create them then someone has to use them. I could sense frustration from him that there wasn’t more warning given because they did know some time before the flood happened that it was likely.”
Peckham joins Pomeroy and his team two weeks after the floods in the Rockies as the scientists study things such as river flows and the levels of water trapped in the canopy on the mountains. He talks about the weird impact the Pine Beetle could have on future flooding and, perhaps most disturbingly, reveals how easily it could all happen again.
“The big fear, while we were shooting (two weeks after the floods), was that there was such incredible saturation of the ground in the mountains and on the mountain floor,” Peckham says. “Even up in the Alpine regions at the very tops of the mountains, we were in rubber boots. With that much water, had there been heavy rain within a week or two or when we were actually there, there would be nothing to stop it from being another cataclysmic event.”
Meanwhile, in High River, Daily Planet looks at the efforts of Canadian Dewatering to pump out 1.3-billion gallons of water out of the town, another segment that seems to act as a bit of cautionary tale.
“It’s basically explained that High River is in a prairie basin,” says Peckham. “When the water gets in, there’s nowhere for it to go. If it weren’t pumped out, it would be 100 years or more for that water to actually leave, if it ever did. It would likely be a permanent lake. Those are the facts from the scientists. From there, someone has to say ‘What does that mean for us in terms of where we build our homes and how we build our communities.’”
That said, Daily Planet tends not to delve into debating political solutions. But Riskin says he hopes a week’s worth of studying disasters — either how to respond to them or avoid them in the first place — will spotlight the importance of science in how those solutions will be achieved.
“I really do see these scientists as heroes,” he says. “The work that they do in the three years or the 30 years leading up to the event deserves recognition. We often take our scientists for granted. They really do have a big hand in making our lives safer and better.”