Fort McMurray residents evacuate due to worst flooding region has ever seen

A state of emergency was called for the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray Tuesday night, after days of heavy rain forced streams and rivers in the area to overflow their banks, causing the worst flooding the region has ever seen.

A representative of McMurray Aviation began posting pictures of the flooding on Twitter as of Tuesday morning, showing the dramatic rise in waters:

"We've never seen water levels like it here for as long as they've kept records, that the Hangingstone [River] is the highest it's ever been, and obviously … that's created some challenges, and caused damage to the river banks, large erosion, roads have gone, pathways have gone, electrical power poles have fallen in the river. It's been — it's been quite the ride," said Darby Allen, the region's fire chief, according to CBC News.

[ Related: Fort McMurray floodwaters wash out roads, power ]

So far, according to Allen, 151 people have evacuated the flooded areas voluntarily, with another 20 people choosing to stay. No mandatory evacuation order has been given yet, but residents in the area affected are apparently waiting for authorities to show up on their doorstep. "Like panic-attack packing. It's like grab everything, what's important and what's not, because if they start knocking on the door, we have 10 minutes to get out of here," said resident Katharina Durand to CBC News.

Attempts were made on Tuesday morning to sandbag the river's edge, but the speed of the rising waters caused the effort to be abandoned.

"We were actually initially sandbagging at that time, but it became evident that there was so much water flowing, it was a losing battle," Fire Chief Allen told CBC News, and according to the 790 CFCW news team Twitter feed, the situation hasn't gotten any better since.

[ Related: State of emergency declared in Fort McMurray ]

If the rising flood waters weren't bad enough themselves, as pointed out on DeSmog Canada, they "may pose an unprecedented threat to the region's growing tailings ponds, a number of which are located directly along the banks of the Athabasca River."

These tailings ponds, located north of Fort McMurray, are where millions of litres of polluted waters are stored from use in extracting bitumen from the Athabasca oil sands. Problems with runoff from the oilsands have already been seen, with University of Alberta ecologist Dr. David Schindler calling for the reopening of the Experimental Lakes Area to investigate fish deformities found in local rivers, but if flood waters were to overrun these ponds, it could be an environmental disaster.

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The area has already been having problems with flooding since Sunday, when Highway 63 was closed due to rising waters and a bridge on Highway 881 was washed out. Emergency crews managed to reopen Highway 881 shortly afterwards, but it was closed again on Monday due to more problems. Crews opened up both lanes of Highway 63 on Tuesday, apparently just in time for Mayor Melissa Blake to declare a state of emergency.

Although the heavy rains have stopped, there's still thunderstorms in the forecast for today and tomorrow, possibly bringing another 20 mm of rain, and showers are expected to persist into Saturday before the region has a chance to dry out.

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