ONE YEAR AGO
• Underground cable failure and a vehicle accident involving an electrical transformer knocked out power four times during the recent heat wave to about 250 Glendale area homes. Power first went out late last Wednesday for a few hours. It cut out again on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
• A broken pipeline under the Red Deer River, which led to an oil leak and temporary closure of Gleniffer Lake in June, has been fixed. Pembina Pipeline Corp. obtained federal and provincial permission to divert a channel of the fast-flowing Red Deer River in order to safely access part of the pipeline that failed on June 15.
In a costly and labour-intensive effort, company workers installed two rock diversion berms last month to redirect the Red Deer River away from the pipeline site, 30 km upstream of Gleniffer Lake, north of Sundre.
FIVE YEARS AGO
• Culprits trashed and burned a Red Deer home that had recently been sold. Red Deer Emergency Services estimated the culprits caused $25,000 damage to the single family home in the city’s Normandeau subdivision. The previous owners had just moved out the night before.
• The Town of Lacombe announced it had to borrow another $147,000 from the provincial government for a sewage project after it came $607,000 over budget. The remaining $460,000 came from the town’s reserves. Officials said Alberta’s construction boom drove up prices.
10 YEARS AGO
• Liquidation sales began at the Eaton’s department store in Bower Place Shopping Centre, as the company announced plans to liquidate its assets. The store would close shortly afterward.
• Record amounts of rainfall killed business for area resorts, cutting sales for some Sylvan Lake businesses in half.
25 YEARS AGO
• Seeding clouds over the Rocky Mountains could produce more moisture for Alberta crops, said Colorado weather modifier Lou Grant.
Mr. Grant told a North American Weather Modification Council meeting at the Red Deer Lodge, about 30 per cent of mountain clouds can be made to snow longer and harder if they are seeded.
He said making snow in winter is easier than making rain in summer since clouds are cooler and ice crystallization is easier to achieve.
• The opening of the new Bay Furniture Place and Home Store in the downtown core marked a major step forward in the revitalization of the area, said the manager of the Towne Centre Association.
“As one of the main anchor business for the downtown core, (The Bay) has to have a very positive effect on the entire downtown,” said John Ferguson.
The association planned to join in the Bay’s grand opening by operating “pedi-cabs” — three-wheeled bicycle units used as a shuttle service for shoppers.
50 YEARS AGO
• In what had been termed “the finest production ever staged in Red Deer,” the Banff School of Fine Arts Opera Company’s “Madame Butterfly,” kept an audience of more than eight hundred spellbound at the Memorial Centre.
The second annual tour production of the Banff School company, the opera was sponsored in Red Deer by Cothurn, one of the city’s amateur theatrical .
• The woes springing from flooded basements and other examples of inadequate drainage descended on city council as several delegations, one of them representing 75 home owners, laid their complaints before the mayor and aldermen.
Fairly widespread basement flooding through sanitary sewer back-up flow had been intensified that summer and city officials admitted that the extensive street paving had intensified the problem by funneling a large quantity of surface run-off via catch basins into the sanitary sewer systems.
City Engineer Nelson Deck explained that large areas in the city were still not served by storm sewers, but that in districts where the storm sewers were in operation, few problems had been encountered.
90 YEARS AGO
• A very sad death took place on Monday forenoon in the Blindman Valley near Bentley, when Mrs. Wm. A. Hankins died as the result of an overdose of medicine self-administered. The deceased has been feeling indisposed for a few days, and evidently tried to better her condition by resorting to some kind of patent medicine. The result was a poisoning of the system which could not be overcome.
For two or three hours, suffering was intense, when death released her about 11 a.m. She was born in Iowa 51 years ago. She leaves a husband and seven children.
• Last Friday’s hailstorm will long be remembered as one of the most destructive that has ever visited the district. Its coming was unexpected. Its onslaught was unprecedented. Its effect was varied; some placed only 10 per cent of the crops being destroyed, other places being completely wiped out, and odd strips missed by the storm entirely.
100 YEARS AGO
• J. Kendall of the Industrial School was reported to have grown a tomato measuring 20 cm in diameter.
• A man named McGaw was jailed for 30 days by a local judge for stealing unspecified articles from the Windsor Hotel.