Fish Creek Provincial Park flood recovery to focus on bridges, pathways

Fish Creek Provincial Park in Calgary's south end was devastated by floodwaters last year, but today broken pathways, damaged bridges and cordoned-off areas remain.

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Joey Young,a senior parks planner for Alberta,says the focus right now is to complete one vital piece of infrastructure.

"The Sue Higgins Bridge does provide a fair bit of not only access to the park but also it's part of [the] commuter route for people on the east bank of the Bow River to commute down into downtown Calgary," he said.

Young says the hope is to get the project doneby the fall.

"It is a City of Calgary bridge, so we are working very closely with them on the bridge designs and also the pathway connections."

It is part of the next phase of the park's recovery. The first phase included cleaning debris from pathways and restoring day-use areas.

The work was completed with help from The Friends of Fish Creek volunteers.

Now the focus is on bigger projects, like building better bridges and pathways.

'Making them more resilient'

"Just even the design of our pathways and making them more resilient in times of flood so high water can go over top of them and debris can settle on them, but we are just able to go in and clean them off very easy," said Young.

He says this flood mitigation work is building on the flood recovery work done after the 2005 flood.

Residents interested in finding out more about the flood mitigation work are invited to attend an information session next Tuesday at the Fish Creek Environmental Learning Centre from 4:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m. MT for more details.

The flood repair work is part of the$81 million designated for flood recovery in Alberta parks.

Roughly $16 million is designated for Fish Creek Provincial Park, with $60 million designated for Kananaskis Countryand $5 million for other areas, including Wyndham Carseland Provincial Park and Oldman River Provincial Recreation Area.