City says fixing flooded underpasses would be ‘challenging’

At least five vehicles got stuck in the water when two downtown underpasses flooded in Tuesday night’s storm — and the City of Regina said those two were their biggest problems.

“Those probably had the broadest impact on the largest number of people,” Pat Wilson, the city’s director of water, waste, and environmental services, said during a media conference Wednesday at City Hall.

Wilson said city crews were sent out as soon as they knew the water was in the underpasses.

There are lifts in both the Albert Street and Broad Street underpasses, but Wilson said they were overwhelmed with water.

“The pumps continued to work in both the Broad Street underpass and in the Albert Street underpass,” Wilson said. “The pipes were full of water, so there was nowhere for it to go, so it was pushing back out and flowing back into the space.”

According to Wilson, the city invests a lot into the drainage system. She talked about the retention pond near the Victoria Street underpass and pointed out that’s why that underpass didn’t flood.

The city won’t be doing work to improve the Albert Street underpass until 2021 or 2022. Wilson said areas like that one are more challenging.

“There is not space to have a (retention) pond there so we have a much more challenging solution — possibly something like underground storage, which is also a much more expensive solution, so we have to plan for those over time,” explained Wilson.

She said doing fixes in the Broad Street underpass isn’t in the immediate plan, but it is being reviewed by the city.

Wilson said city officials will use the data from this storm to help figure out what improvements need to be done.

“Whenever we see these big rainfall events, this all gives us a great deal of information we can use to manage our drainage models, so we do a lot of work to determine where we expect to see problems and to plan our capital investments,” explained Wilson.

Wilson said there will always be storms large enough to overwhelm any drainage system, but the City of Regina still has work to do to get its system to where it needs to be.

Police were swamped, too

Regina Police Service Chief Evan Bray said Wednesday that he was proud of the work the officers — and other city employees — did to get things in the underpasses cleared up Tuesday.

“We were able to really minimize the damage that was done and hopefully keep traffic moving fairly efficiently in a manner that obviously was a little bit challenged with all the water we had,” Bray said.

He recommended that people should refrain from driving into underpasses when water is collecting. He noted officers would rather stop traffic to help drivers back away from a puddle than try to help motorists get out of flooded cars.

“It’s a challenge that we’ve seen before,” Bray said. “Those underpasses tend to flood and so it’s one of those things.

“Last night’s storm came up so quickly, we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. Luckily no one was seriously injured and there wasn’t a lot of damage that was done.”

Power outages

There were a lot of people in Regina breaking out their candles on Tuesday night during the storm. SaskPower said about 2,500 customers in the Regina area were hit with outages.

Areas in the east part of the city, including Emerald Park and White City, were out for about an hour and a half starting at 7 p.m., according to SaskPower’s Joel Cherry.

Customers in the northwest, including the Dieppe, Rosemont and Pioneer Village areas, were without power for nearly four hours.

Areas outside the city had it worse.

In the Kronau and Lajord areas, many people lost power during the storm but it wasn’t back on until 9:40 a.m. on Wednesday. Cherry said crews had to go home at one point in the night and start up again the next morning.

There was an outage for Grand Coulee as well that was being worked on Wednesday morning. Everyone there had power back by 1 p.m.

Cherry said the causes of the outage were mostly related to lightning strikes, though wind and a few downed trees were factors as well.

— With files from 980 CJME’s Nathan Meyer