In the thick of it: One volunteer's story of how Albertans faced up to the June floods

When the floodwaters rose throughout Southern Alberta in late June, bringing a catastrophe unprecedented in the province’s history, UNA members like Marie Aitken were in the thick of it, helping victims and restoring order to chaos.

Aitken, an RN and UNA activist, lives on a farm west of Claresholm, a few kilometres south of High River, the Alberta community of 13,000 hit hardest by the flood. She is also a Red Cross volunteer who has helped with disasters elsewhere in the province, like the 2011 fire that destroyed the town of Slave Lake. Still, she recalls, as someone who spent part of her youth in High River, 37 kilometres south of Calgary, she’d never seen anything quite like this. “My parents’ old acreage is two miles from the river and that whole area had to be evacuated by boat,” she said. “I told them: you should have kept that place – you’d have ocean-front property now!”

When Aitken received a call from the Red Cross on June 20 saying there was flooding around High River, she headed to Nanton, halfway between High River and the Claresholm Care Centre for Mental Health and Addictions where she works. There she helped open the evacuation centre set up by the Town of Nanton’s Emergency Management Team. She was back at 6 a.m. the next day as Thursday night’s trickle of evacuees steadily grew, with people showing up all day at the makeshift facility in the town of 2,000’s recreation centre.

Thankfully, there were few fatalities, but with the entire population of High River forced to evacuate on short notice, many who turned up in Nanton were desperate for necessities, Aitken recalls.

And there were shortages of essential supplies – such as cots, which were slowly making their way from Thunder Bay in an air-rail-truck container. In addition to water, there was too much of some things: “We had politicians up the wazoo showing up unannounced.”

But Aitken praises the way Albertans faced the crisis – with beds found for seniors in empty seniors’ facilities or private homes throughout the region, “awesome” efforts by local first responders and medical staff, and food “fit for kings and queens” served by nearby Hutterite colonies.

Girls and young women from one Hutterite colony even organized a Happy Birthday chorus for an 80-year- old woman forced out of her High River home.

“It was chaos, but it was organized chaos,” Aitken remembers, noting that several UNA members from nearby worksites assisted in Nanton.

Marie Aitken is a District Representative for UNA’s South Central District.