Emotional toll lingers five years after disaster
More than half of the 100,000 Albertans who evacuated their homes during the June 20, 2013 flood suffered from some kind of mental health issue, experts say.
“The effects on the mental health of Albertans affected by the flood has been very significant,” says Caroline McDonald-Harker, a sociologist and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Calgary’s Mount Royal University.
The outcome on the mental health of an estimated 50,000 southern Albertans has been as profound and longer lasting than the visible destruction caused by what was then the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history, says McDonald-Harker, who is also a faculty affiliate with the Centre for Community Disaster Research at MRU.
“More than half of all evacuated people struggled with some type of psychological effect, whether that be PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), depression or anxiety,” she says.
Cathie and Tom Gould don’t doubt those findings, though they have not sought counselling during their five-year ordeal.
“The last five years have been very, very hard,” admits Cathie from the still-unfinished front veranda of the family’s Roxboro home, which they have painstakingly rebuilt themselves, just moving back into the house a few weeks ago.
The family received very little money from their insurance — only for the sewage backup and not the overland flooding from the Elbow River that filled their basement and flooded their main floor as well.
More than one kilometre from the river, the Goulds say the overland flooding came down the road when the pedestrian bridge over the Elbow River trapped debris. They received just $75,000 from the provincial Disaster Relief Fund and since the flood created a rush on rental accommodations the family had to buy a bungalow in Southwood where they lived until they could fix up their home.
They thought the rebuild would take six months to a year. It has taken five years.
“We’ve tried to do it on a shoestring,” admits Tom. “Some of our neighbours are quite wealthy. After the flood they went on vacation and when they returned their house was all cleaned up and rebuilt. Well, we can’t afford to do that.”
Tom, a lawyer who at the time was representing the Tsuut’ina in the ring road negotiations, and Cathie, an elementary school teacher at Queen Elizabeth, were working full time at their respective jobs, parenting a busy preteen in hockey and band and trying to rebuild their destroyed home in every other spare moment.
One anecdote in particular illustrates just how much stress they were under, acting as the “general contractors” for the rebuild — a role new to both of them.
“We were going out to look at windows,” explains Tom. “We’re driving on Deerfoot towards Douglasdale and Cathie was so mad at me, she said ‘Just stop the car, let me out.’ I said, ‘We’re on Deerfoot Trail; I can’t let you out, please don’t get out.’”
“I said, ‘I gotta get out,’” pipes in Cathie.
“I eventually let her out on Deerfoot and I had to leave; it wasn’t safe. I drove back around and she wasn’t there. She walked and it took her a really long time to get home, so that shows just how on edge we were.”
This type of relationship stress in the months and years following the flood is not unusual.
Timothy Haney, director of the Centre for Community Disaster Research at Mount Royal University, discovered in his comprehensive study of 407 Calgarian evacuees that 42 per cent of people whose properties flooded said the natural disaster had negatively impacted their spousal relationship.
Another report, entitled Public health surveillance response following the southern Alberta flood, 2013, reveals that new prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications and sleeping aids for women residents of High River increased by 95 per cent in the six-week period following the flood.
To add to Cathie and Tom’s stress, Cathie broke her wrist, which required several surgeries; a pipe in their new kitchen sprung a leak; they had another pipe burst in a bathroom in their Southwood home; and worst of all, their youngest of five children, Michael, who was just 12 at the time of the flood, struggled with all of the change and loss.
Michael, now 17, has just graduated from Western Canada High School, which also suffered flood damage, and is set to attend Carleton University for journalism in the fall — a career path, he says, that was largely carved out for him by the rushing waters that so disrupted his life.
Not only did Michael lose almost all of his possessions and his home, he also lost his neighbourhood and his proximity to lifelong friends, because the family was forced to move to a suburb a long drive away.
“My Grade 8 year was really tough,” explains Michael. “My marks in Grade 7 were all in the mid-90s range and my mid-term marks in Grade 8 plummeted to the 60-per-cent range.
“Now I’m back on the honour roll, but it was a terrible, terrible year,” he recalls. That already difficult year was made worse when he had to quit playing hockey (thereby being separated from another group of friends) because of one too many concussions.
“I felt so uprooted,” he says. “It was like we hit an iceberg and then we hit a bomb at the bottom of the ocean, too. So much changed in such a short period of time.”
Rather than have Michael attend a school near their new home, Tom and Cathie decided they would drive him to Western Canada High every day so he could be with his friends. Michael’s grades and outlook improved dramatically, thanks in large part to super supportive teachers.
McDonald-Harker acknowledges that the flood was particularly hard on children.
“Along with nightmares, many of the younger children no longer wanted to sleep in their bedrooms and didn’t want to leave their parents,” says McDonald-Harker. “Even some adolescents who sleep in the basement didn’t want to sleep there anymore. They refused because they were nervous that a flood would happen.”
Julie Drolet, associate professor of social work at the University of Calgary, says just as the raging rivers churned up all sorts of debris in their path, the water did much the same to people’s psyches.
In a report entitled Responding to Disaster-Related Loss and Grief: Recovering From the 2013 Flood in Southern Alberta, Drolet and coauthor Amy E. Fulton, interviewed many social workers and counsellors dealing with flood victims.
The flood dug up all sorts of issues in people’s lives, said one counsellor in the report.
“Suddenly they were dealing with childhood abuse that they have never dealt with before …. (The flood) just triggered (their grief.) The image here is everybody is bringing everything from their basement and putting (it) on the lawn, but that happened psychologically, spiritually too, and suddenly everything came out and was on display.”
The report points out that being uprooted and losing a lot of sentimental possessions can lead to grief, and that should be normalized, says Drolet, who was interviewed from Swaziland in southern Africa, where she is training social workers as part of a European Union-funded project.
Drolet says many children not only lost all their possessions, but also their private space and in many cases their public spaces, too. She says it’s normal to grieve such losses
McDonald-Harker says many of the parents and children she researched for her qualitative study on the flood said they were re-traumatized when another disaster hit Alberta — the Fort McMurray wildfire in May 2016. And every spring, those living in flood-affected areas grow anxious with the swelling of the rivers in their community, watching the snow pack and weather forecast with worry.
“A lot of families don’t reach out to access resources and support for their mental health because they think the focus should be on rebuilding and it will go away,” McDonald-Harker says.
“That’s not the case. What we end up seeing is that there are mental health effects many, many years after experiencing the flood.
“What I’m hearing is that the three-year mark is when people start to realize that their mental health issues aren’t going away, but by then most of the supports are no longer available.”
A mother of three children herself, McDonald-Harker says, “There were many families who struggled with emotional issues, lots of relationship conflict and strain, but those who had strong communication were better able to cope and they had those life skills to help them move forward.”
This was something the Gould family has excelled at and why they have managed so well through their rebuilding ordeal.
Back at the Gould residence, Cathie points to a red sign reading “HOME” on her new granite kitchen counter.
“This,” she says, sweeping her arm around her stylish but chaotic kitchen, still filled with boxes packed with serving platters and pots, “is home.”
Some of the lasting effects of the stress can be expected to linger for years to come, but McDonaldHarker notes the disruption caused by the flood wasn’t all negative.
“Besides getting to know their neighbours better and seeing the best in others who came out in droves to help others, many families have said they spent their whole life working towards purchasing and accumulating material objects,” she says. “And, in an instant, that was all gone and it really caused them to pause and reflect on their life and recognize that things like family and relationships are much more important than things.”