Neighbour Day turns to cleanup day in N.E.
The third Saturday in June is typically Neighbour Day for Calgarians. For the city’s northeast still showing the scars from a billion-dollar storm, neighbours will be coming together to pick up the pieces remaining from last weekend’s destruction.
The City of Calgary has distributed 30 garbage bins for residents across the northeast to deposit damaged siding and shingles, broken windows, waterlogged carpet and underlay and other damaged household materials.
The city will also be hosting a community support centre, where residents can get information about how to recover from last weekend’s storm.
“We know that an emergency like this can be very overwhelming for citizens,” Calgary Emergency Management Agency deputy chief Susan Henry said Friday in a news conference.
The community support centre will run at the Genesis Centre’s southwest corner parking lot from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The city will answer inquiries on building permits, offer tips on safely hiring licensed contractors to repair damage, answer questions on city bylaws and offer cleanup tools and supplies. To prevent the spread of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic, the city asks that residents not attend if they’re feeling unwell. Physical distancing will be practised at the support centre and masks are encouraged, Henry said.
Hail the size of tennis balls pounded the city’s northeast last weekend in a storm that city officials say caused over $1 billion in damage. Henry said there are 20,000 home, auto and business claims to the Insurance Bureau of Canada so far and she expects that number to increase.
“Every car that I’ve witnessed that was parked on the street last Saturday night is probably a writeoff,” Ward 5 Coun. George Chahal said at the news conference.
The storm sewers also overflowed, causing overland flooding in some areas of the northeast and trapping vehicles on Deerfoot Trail. Chahal said the storm sewer system is one of the many things the city will have to look at after it cleans up from the storm.
“I think there’s a lot to learn from what’s happening here," Chahal said. “We need to have a thorough review of our storm drains and how much water they can catch and how much they can store and how much can be released in those dry ponds.”
Chahal said the city should also have conversations about what can be done with building materials to make them able to withstand Calgary’s regularly occurring storms.
“We do sit in an area between Calgary, Red Deer and Banff, which is known for its hail storms and the high velocity of those hail storms," he said. “I think we need to have further conversations on — I already mentioned building more resilient and sustainable homes that are able to withstand such velocity of the storms."
More information about the City of Calgary’s cleanup efforts, including the addresses of the temporary garbage bins, is available at calgary.ca/haildamage.