Dear Editor,
The word “monsoon” is becoming synonymous with Alberta. From south of Calgary to the northern reaches of Slave Lake, we are becoming home to monsoons that belong in the southern rain forests. Is our weather acting strange? I’d say it is. After seven months of hard winter, we bypass spring and jump straight into the monsoon season, where flooding across a region 1,200 miles long and 700 miles wide has become the norm, and where baseball- or tomato-sized hail stones barely raise the eyebrows anymore.
Here we sit watching our northern lakes dry up and shrink at alarming rates, while our highways get washed out from draining flood plains.
If they want to know where all the water is going, then they need to come to Barrhead, where we got hit with a monsoon that in 45 minutes dumped four inches of hail and three inches in rain.
The streets became fast-flowing knee-deep rivers that filled basements and stores to capacity. The lightning and thunder was a continuous roar, but was drowned out by the howling wind and the pounding of the raindrops. (It’s a place) where eight-foot by 10-foot wooden sheds floated through town like north Saskatchewan River pirates intent on stealing grain from all the local farmers. As this storm meandered across the prairies, menacing grain bins, it then turned really nasty and became a monster, dropping baseball-sized hail and vacuuming up one farm.
The end of August will bring the first frost that turns the corner into winter when all this rain will then become snow. Remember, one inch of rain becomes 10 inches of snow, and that’s just life on the prairies.
W. Krechun
