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Extensive spring flooding has closed over a dozen roads across the province, displacing some and leaving around 19 people stranded near Struthers Lake Regional Park.
Water completely washed out a nine-foot culvert on the single access road into Struthers Lake Regional Park, in the Rural Municipality of Ivergordon – roughly 126 km northeast from Saskatoon.
“There’s about 19 people in there that are stranded,” said Kevin Hawreschuk, reeve of the Rural Municipality of Invergordon. The RM declared a local state of emergency on Sunday due to severe flooding.
Hawreschuk said the RM is working with the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) emergency services to coordinate a plan to evaluate those stranded.
“We’re expecting they’ll be out of there hopefully in a few hours, if all goes well,” Hawreschuk said.
The council for the RM and emergency services were working Sunday morning to get access to necessary pasture land and government acres to bring in heavy equipment to help clear snow, according to Hawreschuk.
He said the plan was to go in “with some side-by-side with tracks,” a type of all-terrain vehicles, which are being provided and “then bring people out that way.”
The community has also located a temporary bridge for the washout, which Hawreschuk said should be installed in two or three days.
The RM has been hit with lots of water from melting snow, with around 20 roads either washed out, were covered by water or had to be closed this spring season so far, he said.
He said the community’s culverts haven’t been able to take the amount of water, and that many at the municipality have been working “lots of hours” to try to redirect the water flow.
“It’s one of those years where everything is happening at once it seems, so we’re dealing with it,” Hawreschuk said.
He said he doesn’t want people to panic as even though the flooding is worse than any many previous years, “it’s manageable.”
“We’re working through it and we’ve got a good crew of guys we’re working with,” Hawreschuk said, “So we’re getting her done.”
‘Wow, that’s a lot of water’
Long-time RM of Invergordon resident Gordon Harding lives just east of the washed-out road and helped report it to the RM early Sunday morning.
He said he got a call from a neighbour informing him of the washout, and went to see the road at around 6 a.m. CST.
He said his first reaction was “wow, that’s a lot of water.”
“I walked up and the whole section of the road was gone,” Harding said.
“You couldn’t see where the road was out, so I went home and got a couple of cones and put them over there,” he said.
He said quite a few people live year-round on the other side of the washout and the access road is the only way in.
Harding says the flooding this year has been the worst in decades.
“Last time it was like this was ’74,” he said. “And the majority of the water still isn’t here.”
Across the province, more than at least 16 highways were closed amid spring flooding as of early afternoon Sunday, with the majority in the eastern part of the province.
The SPSA says it is currently responding to 16 flooding incidents as of noon Sunday. Several communities, including the Town of Arborfield, have declared states of emergencies or flooding advisories.
In northern Saskatchewan, dozens of people from English River First Nation have been displaced after multiple washouts over the weekend on highways 918 and 165.
With at least three active closures as of Sunday on highway 918, according to the province’s highway hotline, the community of Patuanak is completely cut off.
