Water, water, everywhere

Yep, southern Alberta got a little wet. A crazy heavy rain system moved through and melted a bunch of the snowpack that was still hanging around in the mountains.  And all that water went rushing down stream with great abandon. I won't list all the damage here, you can Google it to see lists and pictures and anything else.

On Thursday, they started to evacuate communities that were in immediate danger of flooding. By Thursday evening, the radio stations were listing additional communities that might be evacuated, including mine! Stuart and Michelle walked down to the river and didn't think they we were going to be in danger, so sometime after 11pm, I gave up and went to bed.

I slept through it, but Stuart got a text after midnight from my mom, saying she'd heard that our neighbourhood was being evacuated and another from Michelle saying that she was being evacuated! But no one ever knocked on our door.  In retrospect, it turned out that they wanted to shut off power to the houses closest to the river and that meant taking out a whole set.  Fortunately, we were on another switch!

The first I knew about any of this was when I came down Friday morning to find that Stuart had brought up most of the stuff stored in our basement and piled it in the living room! He was obviously still asleep, so I checked the corporate website, found no message about the office being closed and headed in. I didn't stay long though... the turn-out was maybe 30% and they were talking about the river not having crested yet. So I packed up my laptop and headed home, in case they decided to push the evacuation line out. They never did, but the VPN into work wasn't working, so I ended up taking a nap.

On Saturday, we had a quiet day at the house, took Ursa for a walk, took naps, and waited to see if we'd be booted out. There was supposed to be a nose work class for the dogs at Joyanne's house, but since one of the bridges and one of the roads to Black Diamond was out and they'd turned off the power, that was cancelled. Instead, Mom and Joyanne came to our place on Sunday and we had a little intro class. We also did a grocery run and saw some of the damage to our favourite off leash dog park.

Also on Sunday, I got a very late and pointless text message from the office, hoping we were all safe and saying that some employees had offered space to those who'd been evacuated.  Nice, but by then they were starting to let people back in again, so it mostly just annoyed me.

Since the basement is mostly empty, Stuart has decided to do some renovating down there. He's painting the bare concrete floor (to cut down on the dust) and he's waffling about whether or not to put up dry wall. In the meantime, I guess I live with all the "basement stuff" living in piles around the house. Compared to the folks who've lost everything and have been living in a gymnasium, I really have nothing to complain about!