The rains started to fall about five days ago in southern Alberta, according to meteorologists. The rains were significant. They quickly added up to eight inches in some places, experts said.
The still partially frozen landscape, not able to soak up this unprecedented deluge, flooded neighborhoods from Canmore to Calgary and beyond. It was this unique convergence of factors that played a role in this week’s flood devastation, experts said.
“To have these very large flood events … the stars have to line up,” Uldis Silins, a hydrologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton said.
“In this particular case, it was a little bit of precipitation preceding the heaviest rainfall, and then a period of 16 hours of very heavy rainfall in the Elbow. In the Crow’s Nest Pass, it was about 12 hours of very heavy rainfall on top of already wet ground,” he added.
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