Wet enough for ya?

[Darren Dirt]

There's some before-and-after photos esp. of downtown -- https://twitter.com/search?q=%23yycflood&src=hash

and one thing I've learned: it's not just the Stampede grounds, but ... well...

"BREAKING: Water is up to row 10 at Saddledome. Dressing rooms completely submerged. Jumbotron rm & all equipment destroyed."
- https://twitter.com/EricFrancis/status/348110337024860160 (Calgary Sun columnist -- 4 hours ago)

[Thorin]

Okay, this pic is funny:



source: https://twitter.com/markusoff/status/348165586628509697/photo/1

Yup, caught a fish with her bare hands out on the street in front of her house.  Didn't even put down her coffee.

[Darren Dirt]

Okay, this pic is funny:



source: https://twitter.com/markusoff/status/348165586628509697/photo/1

Yup, caught a fish with her bare hands out on the street in front of her house.  Didn't even put down her coffee.

another funny-but-scary: watch this huge tree take a dirt nap thanks to the power of H2O:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151564816986026&set=vb.176351929083336&type=2&theater



but back to yikes seriousness...


more before-vs-after
http://globalnews.ca/news/661667/photo-gallery-calgary-floods-before-and-after/


https://twitter.com/CalgaryPolice/status/348137809883828225/photo/1
I guess it's more than just a couple of inches in downtown.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/pictures-and-videos-of-flooding-in-canmore-and-calgary-alberta-1.1334613
Victoria Park in Calgary:


"Stampede Grounds are under water and water is entering the Saddledome." (5 hours ago)

[Thorin]

And this one really shows what's happening in Canmore:



source: https://twitter.com/Amazing_Capture/status/347911379614826496/photo/1

[Thorin]

It's kinda hard to see, but the sprinklers are on at this church:



source: https://twitter.com/dansgoodside/status/347977412669239296/photo/1

[Darren Dirt]

And this one really shows what's happening in Canmore:



source: https://twitter.com/Amazing_Capture/status/347911379614826496/photo/1

That photo is the highway washout at the intersection of Highway 1 (aka Trans-Canada!) and the Creek; major obviously but from what I've seen Canmore is pretty okay except between that and the upper part of the Creek where there's a ton of houses really close to its banks (i.e. the orange and red ones above).


But Calgary, on the other hand... 




those Elbow Park super-expensive homes I mentioned above are in really bad shape...





And the "Centre Street Bridge" normally has a LOWER deck too:





Downtown 9th Ave SE and "MacLeod Trail" which is a pretty major artery...





also downtown -- 9th Ave SE @ 4th Street... unbelievable







here's some overhead shots of the damage to the Calgary Zoo...












...and the Stampede grounds...












...which is right next to the Saddledome:









And from the Calgary Transit website:


Yikes. Even in the worst blizzard I don't think I've ever seen that scary of a warning message on the ETS website.

I would hate to be the planners and managers @ CT that have to figure all of this out...
http://www.calgarytransit.com/html/rainfall_detours.html

[Mr. Analog]

...good god

[Thorin]

The weird thing is that two days from now the water'll probably all be gone again.  There's gonna be a ton of insurance claims, though.

[Darren Dirt]

Might be a bit more than 2 days -- there's plenty of buildings that might not leak away the water very easily on their own, will need pumping etc. And because of the wide scale of impact, there's certainly gonna be a shortage of technology to get that water out in a decent length of time.


_______
on a less disaster-focused note, I discovered something in Google Maps today.

I searched just for this...
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Calgary%20elbow%20park
...and noticed Google put a dotted boundary around the region I named!

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=edmonton%20balwin
same thing. If you zoom in and out everywhere else, no dotted boundary -- but to help in your search by name of region or neighborhood I guess that feature shows up. Cool.

even works for towns/cities -- and notice when you zoom out it fills it in with a reddish pink color, to make it easy to find that area again.
https://maps.google.ca/?q=red%20deer%20ab

and even countries! http://maps.google.com/?q=america



update: LOL, well now I feel out of touch with the times: "On May 18, 2007 Google added neighborhood search capabilities"

[Darren Dirt]

Might be a bit more than 2 days -- there's plenty of buildings that might not leak away the water very easily on their own, will need pumping etc. And because of the wide scale of impact, there's certainly gonna be a shortage of technology to get that water out in a decent length of time.

The Saddledome is now @ 14 rows of submerging; seems like it's at least partly built below surface level -- some are saying some PRIVATE BOX seats are under water now.

https://twitter.com/buzrbe/status/348135678992855040



Just found a Google map that seems to have collected hundreds of photos with their location. http://goo.gl/maps/q6KmN

This photo montage says it all... wow.


via the "Top photos" @ http://twitter.com/search?q=%23ABflood&src=hash


But that's it for me; fun day trying to juggle actual work alongside the emotional reality inherent in this devestating display of mother nature's power... my wife's siblings and mother currently live in Calgary but luckily not close to the waterways. Gonna head home soon and bear-hug my family as I got a strong dose of gratitude, appreciation, reminder today of what's really precious to me.

[Thorin]

Well yeah, I meant the flood waters on the streets. The Saddledome's main arena floor is indeed built below grade, same as Recall Place and probably every other major arena in North America. Not having to build the walls quite as high saves hundreds of millions in construction costs.

There'll be lots of underground parades that'll take a while to empty, too. I'm expecting the engineers who originally designed them to have thought of some way to get water out, though, so there may already be pumps or at least easy hookups for pumps.

[Thorin]

Well son of a b...  I just went to register my new truck and the registry office says they can't do any registry services due to the flooding in Calgary.

I guess Alberta Registries didn't bother making a backup data room after their fire in their Calgary data center. Would've been nice if they'd set up a redundant data center somewhere else, like here in Edmonton.

[Lazybones]

Well son of a b...  I just went to register my new truck and the registry office says they can't do any registry services due to the flooding in Calgary.

I guess Alberta Registries didn't bother making a backup data room after their fire in their Calgary data center. Would've been nice if they'd set up a redundant data center somewhere else, like here in Edmonton.

Or you know building your data center up a hill and planning floor floods and power issues... I know at least one major data center in Calgary that is not having any issues and it is located fairly close to the river but intentionally WAY up a hill.

[Mr. Analog]

Spoiler

[suspicious]registries is built on a single point of failure and its data centre has been the root cause of several province wide outages in the past, there is a single backup facility however data is constructed in such a way that disaster recovery would be a significant challenge should a major loss of data occur[/suspicious]

[close]

[Thorin]

It could be that they're on the part of the electrical grid that was shut off.  The power company doesn't have their grid set up nicely per block or per neighbourhood in Calgary, it's sorta haphazard and so to turn off the electricity in a flooded area might mean turning off the electricity in a non-flooded area that's on the same part of the grid.

But yeah, Alberta Registries' data center setup leaves a lot to be desired.