After a deluge across Canada’s western prairie provinces, water flowing downstream continues to flood new areas.
Earlier this week a storm moved slowly across the prairies, dumping as much as 250mm of rain in some areas, in just a few hours time. This overloaded city sewers which overflowed into vastly overloaded streams and rivers which spread into already heavily soaked fields.
Many roads and bridges were impassible or even washed away.
Especially hard hit is the vast area around the Saskatchewan-Manitoba boundary. As of yesterday, some 87 towns and cities had declared emergencies.
Estimates now indicate that a total of as much as 8,000 square kilometres of crop land may either remain unseeded, or already seeded crops will be drowned.
Seeding across the prairies had already been delayed due to a longer than usual winter, and now many farms will see reduced acreage and yields or none at all.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said after an aerial tour that it looks like damage will exceed the $360 million dollars spent on flood recovery in 2011.
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