REGINA - The snow melt is happening at a fast clip in Regina with the recent warm temperatures, and residents are definitely noticing.
A number of city streets and alleyways are quickly turning into puddles of water with temperatures reaching above the zero mark, and motorists are doing their best to navigate through those situations. It is also a time when homeowners worry about their basements flooding.
Regina’s Manager of Sewer and Drainage Operations Helene Henning Hill provided an update on the city’s efforts. She said this year’s snow melt is similar to last year, except this time “we have a lot of snowpack.”
“So the snowpack means that there's a lot of snow to start melting in the city and get safely through our system before the watershed melt comes through the city,” she told reporters Tuesday.
Henning Hill said residents need to make sure their home is protected from the snow melt. She urges residents to remove snow from around the foundation six feet back, and to make sure the eavesthroughs are clear of debris and leaves.
“And again, getting that snowpack away from your house as far as you can, and creating some drainage areas for the snowpack to melt and get into the system is key.”
Other things residents can be doing, she said, include “simple things like making sure that if you have any valuables in your basement, you may want to put them into plastic totes, that your sump pump is fully functional, and that your backflow prevention device is also fully serviced.”
When asked if there were particular parts of the city that were problem areas, Henning Hill said the city proactively goes out and removes snow from areas around the city, such as “newer areas where maybe there's no drainage ditch or the snowpack is very high.”
“So we'll actually create our own drainage paths by getting our roadways crew to go out, and they'll actually snowblow using the big snowblowers and create some drainage channels for us. And that helps to get the water moving. And again, it's all around snowpack through the different areas of the city.”
When asked about how many water main breaks have happened so far this year, she could not answer that, but she did note that within the last week ”we went from 17 to 35 in one week.”
If people see a blockage for a storm drain, Henning Hill said they encourage residents “to get out and clear their storm drain if they can, if it's safe to do so.”
“Don't pick up any debris or reach down and try and scrape it off. There may be something under there that's not safe. If you really can't get it open, then that's when you would phone Service Regina. We have jet trucks that can come out and steam them open, or a steamer unit that we also use to get them open. Sometimes they'll let loose on its own, and right now with the freeze-thaw cycle that we're going to be in, you might open it one day and it starts to flow, and then the next day that plug will come again of ice, and you may have to do it all over again.”
As for those driving vehicles or walking on sidewalks, she said with water ponding “sometimes it's not visible what's underneath.”
She recommends making sure children stay safe around puddles, because “deep water can actually open up even some storm drain lids, so we don't want kids to fall into those.” She also said that if walking on some of the storm channels or on some of the lake, “you may want to now hold back on that. It's going to start to get soft. So we do want residents to be safe around that.”
The same thing applied to motorists, she said, as a foot of water can “sometimes just be that problematic point where you're going to do damage to your car.”
Henning Hill said this current melt is just the start .
“The urban melt, which is all the city snow, has to get through the system before we have a watershed melt. The watershed is 3,800 square kilometers of snow pack that has to come through the city safely. That's one of the challenges that we have, is just making sure that that snow melt gets through the city safely.”
