As if waking up to a flooded home and yard isn’t enough, some south side Edmonton residents are now bracing for an insurance battle after Thursday morning’s storm.
Homeowners in Mill Woods have fallen victim to flooding on numerous occasions.
Judy lives near 91 Street and the Whitemud. She’s cleaning up again after another flood has ruined her home, and it’s not the first time; her house flooded in 1991, 2004, and again on Thursday.
“This is the third time our house has flooded.”
“It’s all wrecked again, because there’s mold inside here,” says Judy, as she shows a Global crew around her home.
Early Thursday morning, a huge storm rattled the City, but the south side seems to have felt the worst of the damage. Judy’s street was covered in water, lawns were drowning under several feet of water, and many parked cars were nearly engulfed.
“This truck is getting towed away. This car is being taken away,” reveals Judy.
In this neighbourhood, she’s not alone. Basements everywhere are being emptied.
Many homeowners have been through this before, and now, they have concerns that can’t be eased, and questions that aren’t being answered.
“Eventually, it’s going to get to the point that nobody’s going to insure us,” says Kathy Brower. “They’ve got to do something.”
After the flood in 2004, the City installed new drainage pipes running underneath the berm behind the homes, which allow floodwater to be channeled to dry pond, and away from homes.
“When they put these water holding tanks in, we thought great,” recalls Brower, but come Thursday morning’s storm, it “wasn’t enough. Within probably an hour, the water had risen so high, the city drains couldn’t handle anything.”
“The drainage system in that area is a low spot, so everything comes to one location,” explains Chris Ward, with the City of Edmonton’s Drainage Services.
“The way the houses are designed, there’s no outlet from that area that naturally drains it away. That has been a problem, I believe starting in 2004 event, and it’s something that we were able to address since then, and put the dry pond in and pipes connected from that area and will take the flow into the dry pond.”
However, residents say the system didn’t help.
“If they had done something to fix the flooding, it hasn’t worked,” Mark, an area resident, tells Global News.
“So why did we pay our taxes?” asks Judy, “For our house to flood again? For our insurance to go up? Is that fair to us? Is it?”
Residents aren’t the only ones searching for answers. The City is also investigating why such extreme flooding took place in spite of the new drainage system that was put in place.
“Now that the flood has occurred, what happened? Why did we still have flooding when we have finished works? Or where we do have works, did it work or work well enough?”
Ward says it’s still early in the situation, and the City will find out why so much damage still occurred.
“Was this storm what we expected and what the system was designed to do, or was this storm even bigger than we had designed it for. I don’t have those answers right now. That’s all part of going forward to look at what happened in this area.”
Ditches along 91 st overflowed with water Thursday morning; spilling into the street, which may indicate the storm was simply so strong it overwhelmed an otherwise solid plan.
Still, if that’s the case, residents of Mill Woods want the plan improved.
“They should be compensating all the people in this area and all the insurance companies,” says Judy.
For homeowners, once again having to deal with post-flood damage, it’s frustrating, and – Brower says – upsetting.
“It’s heartbreaking.”
With files from Fletcher Kent
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