CEMA continues to make strides as City plans for long weekend
Posted Jun 29, 2013 6:48 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Enmax has announced that as of 9:30 Friday evening, they have restored power to remaining portions of downtown Calgary.
Customers in the Northeast area and the East Village can now go ahead with steps to power up their individual buildings by contacting 311 and arranging inspections, if they haven’t already done so, in order to get reconnected.
This area, with about 470 customers was one of the hardest hit and presented some significant challenges for Enmax.
Officials say they understand that as you head back to your business or home you maybe wondering why people down the street have electricity and you do not. That just means you’ve been disconnected from the system, due to access issues, inability to inspect or confirmed water damage.
Your building must be looked at by a city inspector before the building’s power is restored by Enmax.
To schedule the inspection, call 3-1-1, use the city’s 3-1-1 app, log on to calgary.ca, go to a local community centre or go Enmax’s outage page and for those in condo’s or apartment buildings, the inspection must be called in by the building manager.
Some roads will be closed until further inspection can be done including St. George’s Drive near the Zoo, the 4th St. underpass and 9th Ave near City Hall.
Calgarians will now be able to water their plants outdoors with watering cans, but the city is still urging residents not to use sprinkler and to conserve water where ever possible.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi says Canada Day fireworks will still go on at 10:45 at the Centre Street Bridge, but river banks are still not a good place to watch. He suggests watching the fireworks from Nose Hill Park or Max Bell Arena, both of which have great vantage points.
He is also once again urging everyone to stay off the river.
“Stay of the water, stay off the water, the flows in Bow are still really dangerous no matter what it looks like. The Elbow may be back to normal but those people who live along there have gone through a lot they don’t need you in their back-yard.”
Nenshi says this weekend will be a great time to pitch in and help your neighbour, while celebrating Canada Day.
The Director of CEMA says they are in the preliminary stages of figuring, which homes can be saved in the heavily flood affected areas.
Brian Burrell says until the task forces do a full damage assessment they won’t know, how many homes can not be restored.
“The people who are doing the damage assessments are trained to do damage assessments, they’re not engineers. So there will be other homes that have slid on their foundation for example where a determination has been made is a half inch shift a big deal or does it have to be more than that. We’ll have to bring in structural engineers we do have some in already that we have used in a couple of situations,” said Burrell.
Burrell says a full damage assessment will probably not be available until sometime next week.
City crews from all departments have been working feverishly around the clock for eight days straight to get people back into their homes and get services to the people who need them.
Burrell says they are going to start work on getting these workers downtime.
“We’ve had a lot of people who have worked in excess of 20 hours a day for eight days straight now, that’s helped us get to the point where we are at. But it also take it toll. We are working on staff scheduling and rotation plans we’ve asked every organization that’s been a part of CEMA to help with that. You may see us slow down some of our operations, it’s not because we want to slow down, it’s because we have to slow down. We have to take care of our people too. You can push them hard in the short term, but it is not sustainable over the long term.”
Burrell says there will be staffing plans being implemented in the next few days to that will more people taking time off.
