Homeowners pick up the pieces.
Water-logged belongings litter yards
Ryan Dunfield and Shanna McElrea were beyond discouraged Sunday when they returned to their new home on the Elbow River in Calgary to find their recently renovated basement a sodden mess.
Dunfield and McElrea just moved to Calgary from Vancouver in May; the basement in their new home had been redone just six months ago.
Chest-high water that poured into their basement destroyed everything.
On Sunday, they were tearing off damp drywall and ripping up squishy carpet. Their mudcaked, water-logged couches sat on the curb.
“The majority of our living space is available,” Dunfield said as friends helped clear out his home’s lower level. “But the heart of a house is located in a basement. We’ll have to get new boilers, furnace, hotwater tank. All the electrical is toast.”
Dumpsters already lined the streets in affected neighbourhoods and were beginning to fill with lamps, rugs, mattresses and filthy furniture.
On some front lawns, photos and paintings lay drying and curling in the sun.
Soldiers patrolled the streets. Neighbours commiserated.
Some Calgarians were returning to properties spared by flooding, but others were facing extensive repairs to homes and businesses.
“There’s a lot of water. It’s kind of been a blur,” said Dan Coghlin, who in his bare feet on Sunday was cleaning up the mud outside of his parents’ home on Bowwater Crescent N.W. “It was knee-deep all the way around the house. The basement’s got about six feet of water in it. We’re pumping it out now.”
The house was built in 2005.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. Never, ever. Every year we get the flood warning and we figure it’s not a big deal,” said Coghlin. “Every year Bow Crescent gets a bit of water in their yards, maybe their basements. But as far as this, nobody expected this.”
“That street down there was a river,” Coghlin said, pointing to the nearby road. “The asphalt peeled. It’s just unreal. It’s knocked our fence down in the back. It blew our garage
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door in. It’s bad.”
Melanie Walker, who was shovelling mud from her driveway Sunday afternoon, said Friday night there appeared to be no problems in the area.
“I saw a cop car here and then I saw water starting to come between all the houses,” said Walker, who has lived there since 2007.
“There’s a lot of water. It’s kind of a blur. It was kneedeep …”
“Our house is covered up to about a foot and a half inside. We don’t have a basement. A lot of our neighbours’ houses are higher up, so they lost their basements but not their house. But, unfortunately, it looks like we lost everything because we lost the main floor, and that’s the only floor we had.”
Shirley McWilliam returned home Sunday for the first time since leaving Thursday afternoon due to the flood threat.
“I just left with what I had on,” she said. She has lived in her home 37 years.
“My son was here this morning and he told me what was going on. I was devastated. They brought me over. But what can I do?
“Oh my God, my fridge and stove and washer and dryer — you couldn’t see them where they went down in the basement.”
Police said an elderly woman who didn’t leave her home was found dead on Sunday. Duty Insp. Steve Ellefson said the woman was in a ground-floor apartment and wanted to stay behind because she had a cat.
Ellefson said the building was flooded, but that it wasn’t known yet if her death was flood-related or was due to a medical condition.
Three other bodies have been recovered since Alberta floods began and a fourth person was still missing.
The Bow River was still pooling around the Calgary Zoo on St. George’s Island, although all animals except two zebras remained. The striped beasts were moved Friday to a wildlife centre south of the city.