Five years after the flood: Calgary remembers devastating disaster

It’s been five years since one of Canada’s worst natural disasters, but the memories are still fresh

One hundred millimetres of rain fell June 20, 2013, and it continued to fall, spilling the banks of the Bow and Elbow Rivers into many Calgary neighbourhoods, and the downtown core.

“It was Lake Inglewood down here, back then,” Joe Rocheleau remembered.

It took some stores in the area a long time to recover from the damage — a few closing down for as many as six months in the aftermath.

He said the images have stuck with him.

“When I came down here and saw all the water on 9th Ave — it was like, right across it.”

Tara Renton lost everything in her basement in Mission, including wedding pictures.

“I was seven months pregnant at the time, and if it weren’t for the amazing neighbours that we had and the community, I think we would have left.”

She told CityNews, many others did in the aftermath as homes had to be torn down or rebuilt.

“A lot of the history and historic homes are gone now, because of the flood — people always say, everything got back to normal pretty quickly, and actually things still aren’t back to normal,” Renton said.

“I remember walking across the bridge the morning of the flood, actually, and it was like a trickle. We didn’t take it very seriously. We thought, ‘oh, yeah they say it’s flooding in the mountains, but we’ll be fine’.”

Karyn Duffy watched the devastation from afar.

“I’m sitting there in a nice hotel in Mexico, and seeing all of my — my whole neighbourhood being destroyed, and they kept saying that Mission was the worst hit neighbourhood in the city, and I didn’t know what I was going to be coming back to,” she said.

Duffy said when she got back, a foot of water in the main lobby of her high-rise building had caused so much damage that she had to live elsewhere for 23 days.

“As you walked down the street, all you could hear was all the machines trying to get the water out of every single building,” she said.

“The whole neighbourhood was filled with volunteers which was amazing. To see the whole city really come out and help this neighbourhood.”

Lisa Mamakind remembers looking down at the Saddledome from Ramsay and seeing it underwater.

She also recalls a picture her son snapped in Mission.

“It looked like this gorgeous lake, and this scene with the sun going down, but then you saw the top, very, very tops of cars and street signs poking out. To this day, it’s still a very, very striking image for me,” she said.

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