REGINA, Sask. — The rainfall that led to the outright collapse of an already-vulnerable sinkhole in northwest Regina over the Labour Day long weekend was part of what the city is calling a generational weather event.
Speaking to reporters at city hall Tuesday afternoon, Regina’s water, waste and environment director Carolyn Kalim said parts of the city received up to 95 millimetres (about 3.8 inches) of rain over the course of Sunday and Monday.
"We are looking at a one-in-50-year storm event in the northwest area of the city," Kalim said.
One of the hardest-hit areas was Regina’s Rochdale neighbourhood, where a giant sinkhole developed at the intersection of Cunningham Drive and Stephens Bay, near the north entrance to Rochdale Park.
“The city was aware of the sinkhole starting on Aug. 19 and we knew at that time that we needed to drain the stormwater pond that the pipe that failed discharges into,” said Kalim. “So that’s quite a process to get that done and we were going through that process to get it drained and working with our regulator, etcetera.
“Obviously with the storm event we saw some deterioration of that sinkhole and so now we are kind of moving into a more emergent response for that and so we’re looking at the system to see what we can pump out into the stormwater system, what capacity is left there, to try and get that down as quickly as possible.
“What that will do is it’ll allow us to access into the pipe system to actually do the inspection and see what is wrong with the pipe and from there we can determine the repair. So because we don’t know the repair, exactly what we need to do yet, we can’t give a specific timeline but it is a priority as soon as we can get that drained down.”
Cunningham Drive resident Andrew Swanston confirmed in an interview with SaskToday that the distressed area had been a known concern prior to the weekend weather that caved it in.
“So last week I think the ground kind of sunk a little bit, and then I work on the road and when I got home from work on Thursday they had plywood and these barricades all around,” Swanston said Tuesday morning.
“I was unloading my truck and I heard something fall into the hole. And then ever since then it’s just been getting worse, and then with all that rain everybody is out checking this out but the rain just made everything worse and signs were falling in yesterday. It wasn’t this bad two days ago but as you can see everything’s just become a big, big mess.”
For area residents, that mess, for now, is one that Swanston suspects largely consists of a localized traffic snarl, specifically for residents on Stephens Bay, who have no alternate vehicle route out of the neighbourhood. Water availability, at least on his side of the street, has remained normal.
“Water usage has been fine,” he said. “Transportation, we have another way out of the block so it hasn’t been too bad for us. The people in the bay, I think they’re a little more frustrated than we are. I’ve been more kind of entertained by seeing all the people walking by and taking pictures.”
Kalim added that the city is committed to the safety of area residents and city workers or contractors who will work to repair the sinkhole, while also prioritizing the transportation needs of the area’s residents.
“We’re keeping a single lane open for access,” said Kalim. “We want to be able to maintain that so we’ll be doing everything we can to slow the erosion and try and get that stabilized as quickly as possible but our No. 1 priority will be the safety of our residents and our staff and we’ll be doing everything we can to protect private property as well.”
Kalim added that any hypothetical claims regarding property damage would typically be dealt with initially between homeowners and their respective insurance companies.
An estimated timeline for repairs, she continued, will not be available until a site assessment is complete — a project that cannot begin until water levels in the area are drained to a level that allows a proper inspection.
“Our underground infrastructure of course is aging in certain locations, and so any time we have aged infrastructure we can see failures in pipes that allow water infiltration to begin getting into soil and begin creating those washout conditions,” she said. “And so those are the things that just really quickly can go from something that potentially at the surface seems normal and then when we get a bunch of rain we start to realize that there is a failure point.
“We also know that our storm system surrounding the city is actually quite full so we’re not sure how quickly we’ll actually be able to pump into the storm system because we can only pump what it can receive. But prior to this we were anticipating approximately five days to get it down to the bottom and I wouldn’t be able to say with accuracy as to whether we’re going to be able to hit that timeline.”
