Submerged cars, backed-up traffic, overflowing parks: Calgary drenched in rain

Rain has soaked Calgary, causing flooding and traffic headaches. Everyone from golfers to gardeners is now looking forward to a return to sunshine.

A soaking rainstorm that drenched Calgary from Sunday night into Monday caused flooding across the city, with emergency crews responding to submerged cars, backed-up traffic and overflowing parks.

In the 7200 block of 36th Street N.E., a giant puddle swallowed a car, fully submerging it.

Firefighters were called around 10:30 a.m. Monday and waited more than an hour for a tow truck to pull it to higher ground.

Further west on John Laurie Boulevard, city crews rushed to clear another flooded stretch before it could begin swallowing vehicles.

Traffic was backed up around the corner onto McKnight Boulevard as workers struggled to unclog a storm drain.

At Confederation Park, the parking lot near 7th Street and 30th Avenue N.W. filled with water, attracting curious onlookers.

“Where’d everything go?” said Ian Stewart, standing near the flooded lot.

“It’s all underwater. … Just surprised to see how much it has backed up.”

While the rainfall snarled traffic and soaked playgrounds, it also posed problems in Calgary’s gardens and yards.

“We look for balance. Too much of anything can be a bad thing,” said Colin Hayles of Golden Acre Home and Garden.

“Right now, we do have way too much rain. The last stat I saw this morning, the monthly average for July is about 60 millimetres, and we’re already at 143.”

Hayles said excess rain is encouraging mushrooms, slugs, snails and a surge in fungal and bacterial diseases—especially powdery mildew on plants like zucchinis, tomatoes and cucumbers.

“Powdery mildew is a fungal disease. … The problem is, the way we treat it is with a broad-spectrum fungicide, which washes off in the rain. You haven’t done anything,” he said.

“You have to wait for a dry period and spray the plant. You can’t cure it, but you will inhibit the spread.”

Mushrooms are also flourishing in the saturated soil, but Hayles said they’re not harmful.

“All of that rain is sinking deep, deep, deep into all of the layers of soil beneath us. … They’re hitting this wood or organic material and they’re feeding off them,” he said.

“They’re not bad at all—they’re feeding what they call the mycelium network and a lot of people will say when they see the mushrooms, they notice the grass around it is doing good, and that’s because of what the mushrooms are bringing.”

Even trees could face risks—not from rotting, Hayles said, but from shifting in the softened ground.

“If your tree doesn’t have a deep root system, that ground is now soft and muddy. We get a big windstorm; that’s when we can see trees come over,” he said.

Despite the downpours, hydrologists say the rain won’t erase Alberta’s long-term drought problem.

“It’s the most (rain) I can remember for a very long time,” said John Pomeroy, Canada research chair in water resources and climate change at the University of Saskatchewan.

“Some of the stations have had 250 millimetres since late June, which is really exceptional, but stream flow is most efficiently generated by snowmelt.”

Pomeroy said rivers like the Bow and Oldman suffered from a low snowpack this past winter—about two-thirds of normal—and an early melt, leaving them well below average for much of the year.

“The Bow has picked up to above normal flows. … The Oldman has not. It will take more than just a few weeks of rain to move out of the long-term hydrological drought,” he said.

And while trees and crops benefit from summer rain, it comes at the least effective time for recharging deep water supplies.

“Trees can evaporate about 10 millimetres a day. … The reason that snowmelt is so effective is that the trees aren’t transpiring any water,” Pomeroy said.

“We need quite a bit more to make up for that.”

Pomeroy added it would take hundreds more millimetres of precipitation to restore depleted mountain reservoirs.

“I was just up looking at the ones in the Kananaskis area, and they’re still many, many metres below normal levels now,” he said.

Even with the puddles, soggy lawns and garden woes, Calgarians likely haven’t seen the last of the rain.

And for now, Hayles recommends turning off the sprinklers.

“Right now, I think we’re good to put the sprinklers and the irrigation systems away for a bit,” he said.