Grande Prairie has gotten 135 millimetres of rain so far this month, twice leading to flooding at the intersection of 89th Avenue and 108th Street. Capital Planning and Construction Manager Matt Hinton says the flooding was significant in the area, causing vehicles to get stuck, so they needed to ease the pressure of the water build up.
“We have an existing outlet through the Canfor yard that dips down into the Bear Creek, so we actually had to dig a bit of a ditch on top of the berm to allow the water to actually escape faster and alleviate some of the pressure happening upstream in Richmond Industrial.”
Hinton admits they’ve had draining issues in the area before with silt build up and deposited material from the industrial park.
“We did clean out the ditch there a few years ago which helped alleviate the problem, but over the last few years there’s been some build up again so we have to come back in there and clean that ditch out again. Hopefully with the process of us creating the inlet and outlet there at the Canfor ditch, and also cleaning the ditch out, it’ll help alleviate some of those issues.”
Hinton adds that some other smaller areas of the city had flooding issues during recent heavy rain, but not to the extreme of needing to be closed down.