WEYBURN, Sask. — Communities across soggy southeastern Saskatchewan are dealing with displaced residents, sewage-flooded basements and suspect drinking water — the unwanted byproducts of days of rain that has overwhelmed rivers and swollen reservoirs.
“It’s pretty ugly,” said Dustin Bell, who said there’s so much water around his home a couple of kilometres northeast of Weyburn that he can’t drive out to get to work.
“Unfortunately we can’t stop because of this so we had to get a rope and a boat and pull ourselves in.”
The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority warned Monday that levels could rise another half metre in the partially flooded communities of Estevan and Roche Percee, downstream from Weyburn, after water was released from dams on the Souris River.
Residents say they don’t understand why floodgates on the dams are being opened when communities downstream are already under water. But authority spokesman Dale Hjertaas said the reservoirs simply can’t hold back the huge amount of water.
“Everything is very saturated so all the water is running off now,” Hjertaas said. “The bottom line is ... an awful lot of rain fell and an awful lot of water is coming, and the capacity of the reservoir to hold it back is limited. Therefore, most of it needs to be passed on through at this point.”
The areas affected were along the Souris, about an hour and a half southeast of Regina. There were also problems east of Regina, where the Trans-Canada Highway was closed Monday because it was submerged under several metres of water.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall toured the southern areas Monday and said it’s not clear yet how much it will cost the government to help the communities.
“It’s in the millions of dollars certainly and there’s two levels of costs,” said Wall.
“There would be one to the municipalities that already had a lot of stressed infrastructure because of so much rain. That would be true for rural municipalities and our towns and villages and the two cities I went to today in particular, Estevan and Weyburn. We’ve just told them, do what you need to do and we’ll be there for you.”
Wall, delayed his trip to the western premiers conference in Yellowknife, to visit flooded communities.
“I have no more adjectives, I have no more superlatives and I’m a politician so I shouldn’t be lost for words maybe, but I am. It’s hard to describe what you see driving around Weyburn, what these folks have been dealing with.”
The premier said the provincial disaster assistance program gets help from the federal government. But he added they need to work together to prevent future flooding of such magnitude.
Environment Canada said that as of Monday morning, Estevan has had 287 millimetres of rain since May 1, making this the wettest May-June period since records began in 1945. The agency said 112 millimetres of rain had fallen in Weyburn since Friday and more rain was expected Monday.
People were out of their homes in Roche Percee, a community near Estevan with a population of 160. Residents watched a dike breach on the weekend that put much of the community under water.
The Willow Park Greens Trailer Park on the outskirts of Estevan was also under an evacuation order affecting about 400 people.