The Resiliency and Flood Mitigation office in Drumheller has an ambitious plan for the summer as it rolls out some of its initiatives.
While much work has been done in the background since town secured federal, provincial, and local funds of approximately $55 million for flood mitigation and climate adaptation, this season Drumheller residents are seeing work on the ground.
Extensive work began at Newcastle Beach in March where crews were clearing brush and willows along the Red Deer River water’s edge to make room for the river to flow in highwater situations.
Chief Resiliency and Flood Mitigation officer Darwin Durnier said the work will continue.
“At Newcastle Beach, we have to wait for the flood season to end, which is typically July 15, but we also have an approval period where fish spawning requires we stay out of the river. When those pass in July, we will be in the position to fix up the boat launch a little better, groom the beach area and do some more stump grinding and put down a whole bunch of grass seed,” said Durnie.
He adds they have done some preliminary design work on how they will change the dyking in the park, including straightening and heightening them.
The office is also planning to move up worked planned for next year at Centennial Park, the space behind the Badlands Community Facility.
“Because of COVID, and the shut down of the entire area, we’ve decided to accelerate some of our implementation,” said Durnie. “The first part of that would be removing some of the diseased trees and some of the trees that will be in the way of the enhanced dyking that has to be introduced in the area to protect the downtown.”
In the near future, the tree removal and grubbing of the bush will begin. He notes that the work done will not only protect the community but also enhance the space for community usage.
“If we get regulatory approvals to catch up with the process and accelerate that, we’ll commence on doing some of the dyke improvements,” he said.
“We have several areas where we are going to improve the alignment (of the dykes) and take out some of the sharp curves. Other areas we are going to make it much wider so they really play into the BCF for instance, to make it a nice plaza out back where you don’t have to hike down a steep embankment.”
He noted many of the trees in the park are poplars that were planted in the 1960’s, and some have outgrown their useful life, and some are dangerous.
“We are going to thin out some of these trees to make some big wide areas where people can see the badlands but also have some tree coverage remain so it is a nice cool and shady place to be. We’ll actually add more trees to the area from our tree farm as we are able to progress.”
The tree canopy of the community is important for carbon sequestration.
“We have two students out of the GIS and geomatics programs at SAIT who are working around town inventorying all of our trees in the downtown area, Centennial Park, and other areas, so we can establish what age and conditions they are. Then we can start to adapt the inventory at our tree farm to match what we will need in the future, and we can create a good healthy tree stock, acclimated to the valley to replace some of those we take down.”
“Climate adaptation is the biggest part of this program, but we have to look at adaptation. We look at everything from severe stormwater events to making sure the tree canopy is present to help cool and make it a friendly place to be.”
This season Durnie says they hope to complete some embankment work near the Hoodoos towards the Cambia area.
“That will also serve the purpose to open up that leg of Drumheller to a trail network,” he said.
They will also be focusing on working on the plans for the Nacmine area.
“We need to install preventative dyking that meets the water flow, we have to find the route that is suitable from a geotechnical, from a property and flood mitigations (perspective). We are getting the preliminary and detailed design engineering now with a view to hopefully move to land acquisition mid-summer and potentially some segments we’ll be able to build this fall.”