It was two years ago the flood hit parts of the Drumheller area along the Red Deer River Valley, and damaged homes and buildings. Many people are still waiting for answers and Drumheller Mayor Terry Yemen has been trying to get them.
Yemen said that during the disaster in 2013 the town spent a lot of money to fight off the flood and some funding was received for that. He also said the town applied for other money to buy pumps and to prepare in case this was to happen again, and the town received that as well.
“The big thing we have been waiting for is the future mitigation and to find out for the people of Drumheller whose property is in peril. What is the government plan? Are they going to mitigate, is there buy outs, what is going on, that is the question,” Yemen told inSide Drumheller.
“It is frustrating. I have written to them a number of times and they haven’t acknowledged my letters. I have written to our MLA, and I have received nothing from him. They said they are looking into it, but this is from 2013 so looking into it is not the satisfactory answer that I am looking for,” he said.
“(The) people of Drumheller deserve an answer. A lot of people’s lives have been put on hold because they are waiting. I get asked frequently ‘should I do this repair? should I do this improvement to my home?’ I don’t know. We just don’t know because the Alberta government hasn’t shared that with us. It is a complete let down by the Alberta government to the people of Drumheller,” he said.
Yemen said the town was working through a process with the conservative government, put in an application but it wasn’t approved.
“Now we just don’t know. Where are we, what’s the mandate of the NDP government. What is their position on flood mitigation? That is the question I have been asking the government and we’ve got nothing back, and it is frustrating,” he said.
“All through this, the town of Drumheller has jumped through every hoop that the provincial government has held out in front of us. If they have said do this, we have done it. If they said provide us with this, it has been done. The last thing was the environmental impact study that they said we want to do that now when we put in our grant application. Well they should have told us that before because we would have jumped through that hoop and had it done too prior to us putting in the application,” he said.
“Don’t take our application and reject it because it wasn’t there, we didn’t know that it was needed because it wasn’t asked for when we put in the application, and this came after the fact,” he explained.
Yemen explained that this isn’t just what the government has been doing since the 2013 flood, this has been what they have been doing since 1985.
“They came here, we have it writing, where they recognized that it is the responsibility of the provincial government to mitigate. There was a go forward plan, and because of whatever reasons it was pushed off to the side. It wasn’t a priority, and there wasn’t funding, so we have been waiting since 1985 after we did have the approval of the Alberta government and where they accepted responsibility for the future mitigation of the Red Deer River... It is rather pathetic to have a provincial government since 1985 and they haven’t done what they said they were going to do. It is complete incompetence,” he said.
