There is that old Will Rogers utterance about "everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it."
We would if we could, right about now.
There can be no blame game, no one to single out for shouldering the responsibility for seeing dozens if not a few hundred people in southeast Saskatchewan witness the slow destruction of their homes and way of life one flood after another.
It would be easy to point a finger at the hard-pressed Saskatchewan Watershed Authority and suggest that they have been negligent in their duties by failing to predict what has turned out to be a once in a 100 year weather event that has turned a usually drought stricken dusty prairie land into Venice north.
We no longer need pickups and ATVs, we need swamp buggies, gondolas and a ferry service to get us over to Weyburn and back home again.
We'll leave it to the greater scientific minds to debate whether this phenomenon we are witnessing is all part of the global warming theory, or whether we've just drawn the wrong card from Mother Nature's deck two years in a row.
Our farmers are devastated, and it appears as if a goodly number of them have washed 2011 crop prospects off the revenue side of their ledger and are now looking rather uneasily at the prospects for 2012. It's quite evident it will take at least a full summer to reduce the moisture content to a level that would make the land suitable for a crop 10 or 11 months from now.
Last year, communities such as Maple Creek and Yorkton suffered the wrath of nature. We got a good taste of it with a wet and cool summer, but it was nothing compared with this semester. It's our turn now. We can only hope that the government agencies are up to the challenge. We trust the political will is there to support those who have lost businesses and houses.
We hear nightmare tales of folks in Maple Creek still waiting for bureaucratic decisions to be made so they can get on with their lives, 12 months after their heartbreaking events. We hope the gurus who were in charge then learned enough from their previous mistakes not to make them again when the time comes for our citizens to make the claims.
As for the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority, there will be plenty of time to assess the reaction work they did on our behalf and we expect it will be done in public with full disclosure so that the swirling rumours of mismanagement or outright incompetence can be addressed in the right forum.
This is not the time for mud slinging, not when our emotions and frustrations are at a sky-high level. We need some careful assessments to be made once this summer of discontent comes to a close. If there was incompetence, it will be exposed, sooner or later. In the meantime, those who are trying to do the right thing, neighbours who are trying to help neighbours, need our vocal and physical support and a huge shout out goes to those who put their lives on hold for weeks on end ... so far, as our communities battled against the weather odds.
It's one year we won't soon forget.
