Premier Brad Wall says the full might of the provincial government is behind Estevan and southeast Saskatchewan as it deals with the flood of 2011 and the inevitable cleanup.
Wall was in Estevan Monday morning to meet with officials from rural municipalities impacted by the flood and Estevan Mayor Gary St. Onge. He later travelled to Weyburn and Radville to get a handle on the situation in those communities. He also toured the area by plane Sunday.
Wall described Monday's meeting as helpful and was quick to praise the work of everyone involved with handling the flood situation in the area.
"We want to acknowledge the response of the people of southeast Saskatchewan," Wall said, "of the mayors, the reeves, the volunteer firefighters and countless others who have done an amazing job of responding to an unprecedented weather event that has us in a one in 500 years situation in terms of flooding.
"We are also grateful to all the folks from the provincial Office of the Fire Commissioner and all the other provincial ministries and officials that have been responding as well as emergency responders to this."
Wall said the meeting focused on where the flood situation was as of Monday morning and what the provincial government can do to help the region cope.
"The government has indicated that we are going to be there for them," he said. "We have greatly improved the Provincial Disaster Assistance Program, we have reduced the deductible, we have increased the coverage for individuals, we have reduced the deductible for municipalities facing huge expenses to rebuild roads. We are going to continue to look for improvements, but we are going to also look to make that money flow as quickly as possible."
Wall said it is too soon to guess what the cost from the flooding will be, but he does expect it will have an impact on the province's bottom line. He added there is a chance they will have to dip into the aptly named rainy day fund.
"We are lucky in the province to have a balanced budget and over $700 million in the bank," said Wall who also touched on the impact on the oil and agriculture industries in the southeast.
"There will likely need to be support for agriculture. There is thousands of barrels of oil shut in right now because of the weather and that impacts the royalties to the province. It also impacts, more importantly, frankly, families and the overall economy of this area because people aren't working. The wheels aren't turning, either on the farm or in the patch."
Wall also touched on the Boundary and Rafferty reservoirs, noting the Estevan area is lucky to have them and that the situation could have been worse had they not been built. However, he said the province also plans to look into whether or not things could have been handled better and how they can avoid a similar situation in the future.
"Obviously if you are in the valley and your place is destroyed you would like to know if the reservoirs are managed as best as possible. We would like to know that too, as a government," the premier said. "We want to make sure we are doing the very best by the people who live downstream of reservoirs in terms of the management of those reservoirs."
