‘We Are Not Okay’: Exshaw Residents Plead for Help With Groundwater Flooding

For 33 years, Brian Thompson could look at the river and know what his basement was going to do.

"For the first 33 years, I could count on the river level to determine groundwater levels," Thompson told the council of the Municipal District of Bighorn on July 14. In at least 12 of those years he got no groundwater at all. In wet years it seeped in along one wall, and two sump pumps were enough. That ended, he said, when the district finished armoring Exshaw Creek in 2019.

"Since the completion of the creek mitigation, I have had groundwater every year, and the water now comes in rapidly and from every direction," said Thompson, a resident of Mount McGillivray Drive for 39 years.

He was the first of three residents to address council in a delegation that ran nearly 40 minutes, reopening a dispute alive since 2020: whether a project built to shield this hamlet from the kind of debris flood that devastated it in 2013 has instead driven water beneath the east end of town. They asked for relief from 2026 property taxes, reduced 2027 assessments, and action on the creek bed.

Council deferred the tax decision to September and, on the larger question, offered sympathy and an acknowledgment that the problem is real.

'We are not okay'

May 2020 was the worst Thompson had seen, and his basement floor, uncracked for 59 years, "was cracked corner to corner." The years 2021 through 2024 were dry. Then came June 2026.

"I was now running five pumps, with four running full time," he said. "My basement floor has new cracks, and my cinder block walls are spurting water everywhere."

"I'm afraid to leave my home for any extended period because it might rain," Thompson said. "I have a home that is unsellable. My physical and mental health has been under severe pressure. The first 10 days in June, I may have slept two hours a night."

Jody Sukin, 29 years on the same street, apologized for her tone in advance. "Sorry, I'm more pissed off than I am sad," she said. "So I don't want to cry."

She listed the damage: electricity and standing water together in basements, mold, trenched yards, sinkholes, soil eroding beneath foundations. The hardest part was psychological, she said, and not triggered by rare storms.

"Anxiety over rain in the forecast," Sukin said. "Not like, you know, hundred-year storm rains. We're talking like normal spring rain." Nobody leaves home for more than an hour or two, she said, in case a pump burns out.

"We are not okay," she said. "The most heartbreaking thing I've heard from a neighbour is, 'I don't like living in a neighbourhood where everyone is angry, anxious and waiting for help that doesn't seem to be coming.'"

The engineering case

The third presenter, Vicki Fleetwood, lives in an affected property and is an engineer with a Cambridge master's and 24 years of experience. She is not a groundwater specialist, she said, but ran her analysis past a senior one in Calgary.

Her argument was that the creek as built is not the creek as designed. A preliminary design in 2015, she said, called for sealing the creek bed so water would run down the channel instead of soaking into the ground, using boulders locked together with concrete grout or interlocking concrete blocks. It also placed the pond that catches sediment on bedrock.

What Exshaw got, she said, was loose rock with nothing filling the gaps, and a pond sitting on the alluvial fan, the apron of gravel the creek has dumped at its canyon mouth over thousands of years. Water drains straight through it.

Since 2020, the district's monitoring well nearest the two streets has recorded a 300 percent rise in days when groundwater sits high enough to cause problems, she said, and only in those years has water pushed up to the surface. The readings are taken by hand and can be wrong, she acknowledged. "But this is such a clear before-and-after trend, and it's the only data we have both before and after."

Her sharpest criticism went to the district's 2023 Matrix Solutions study, which cleared the pond. "It appears to me that they never looked at any changes to infiltration patterns, either in the creek bed as a whole or at the sediment pond," Fleetwood said. Whether water leaks out of the creek into the ground is the question residents have asked since 2020.

Residents are not asking for a rebuild. "We're not looking to go back to 2015 and do the original design," she said. They want the channel bottom sealed and an opening added so the creek reaches the Bow River again rather than vanishing into its own bed, work she said would still catch debris and would not be costly.

Raising the two streets, the other idea on the table, would leave what she called "very high velocity groundwater" moving beneath the houses. Sukin put it plainly: lift the streets to the height of the new subdivision at the hamlet's edge, land that is municipal rather than provincial, "or just buy us all out, because we don't want to live here anymore."

Of 14 residents surveyed the week before the meeting, Fleetwood said, costs incurred and pending reached $350,000, including roughly $60,000 on pumping alone.

Council's response

Council did not dispute that something has changed. It disputed its capacity to fix it.

Councilor Rick Tuza was blunt about the scale. "There are no quick solutions. Anything is going to be expensive," he said. "It involves powers bigger than the MD. It involves budgets bigger than the MD. We have 1,600 people. The resources that we have available to us cannot fix your problems."

Members told the delegation that reworking the creek would need provincial approval and could not happen quickly.

Taxes deferred, disaster funding uncertain

Municipal taxes on the affected properties total roughly $58,700 across the two streets, the district's corporate services director told council. Taxes are based on assessed value, not level of service, she said, and assessments are not adjusted on individual request.

Tuza noted the district's own overtime costs from pumping and lane grading. "If we say, well, we're going to give tax breaks, then we're not collecting money to pay for the extra money that we're spending," he said. "I really do sympathize with the residents of East Exshaw, but the municipality has to operate."

Reeve Lisa Rosvold proposed the deferral, wanting an accounting of what has already been spent on engineering and studies. Hanging over it is the province's Hazard Assistance and Resilience Program, which replaced Alberta's Disaster Recovery Program. Bighorn must apply within 30 days and be approved before residents can apply at all. Its director of protective and community services was candid about the odds. "Groundwater doesn't often become a disaster," he said, though damage to flood infrastructure "may qualify."

Alberta denied disaster assistance to Exshaw residents after the 2020 flooding, CBC News reported then.

What comes next

Council also authorized $150,000 for storm recovery, after events infrastructure director Bill Luka said brought "the highest flows and largest sediment drops since 2013." Members asked administration to catalogue every report ever commissioned on Exshaw Creek. Planning director Hayley Gavin called that slow going: "There are so many; there's thousands of pages."

Councillor Steve Fitzmorris framed the question after more than a decade of studies. "When we have a large project, we investigate, we measure, then we implement," he said. "Now that we've implemented, and we have so many years of running, is there a way of measuring to see how well a project has done?"

Council rises for its summer break and returns in September. Residents on the two streets will be pumping through it.

Background: The Municipal District of Bighorn has consistently disputed a link between the Exshaw Creek project and groundwater flooding. In a statement to CBC News in June, the district cited the 2023 Matrix Solutions study, which found the water table in Exshaw is influenced by rainfall, creek flows and the Bow River, and that the sediment pond does not significantly increase groundwater levels. An earlier independent hydrogeologist's report commissioned after the 2020 event attributed that flooding largely to an above-average snowpack but could not rule out the newly built mitigation as a contributing factor, according to reporting by the Rocky Mountain Outlook. The Exshaw Creek debris-flood mitigation project was designed by Golder Associates and built by Devcon Inc. under a $5.17-million contract awarded in March 2019, with construction running from April to October of that year.