Flooding in Alberta Forces 75,000 to Evacuate

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said that four people may have died near High River, Alberta, which was overwhelmed by floods earlier on Thursday. Two lifeless bodies were sighted but not recovered, a woman was apparently swept away in a camper and a man fell out of a canoe and disappeared.

A stationary weather system brought more rainfall in 48 hours than the normally arid region usually sees in a month, close to a foot of rain in some places.

The Bow River and the Elbow River spilled into five Calgary neighborhoods, forcing a shutdown of the city’s downtown. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation set up emergency facilities at a technical university after its radio and television studios were evacuated. In the Saddledome, where the Calgary Flames hockey team plays, water had risen to the eighth row of seats by midday. And although the city’s zoo, on an island in the Bow, was flooded, Mayor Naheed Nenshi said that it was not necessary to evacuate the animals “as much as I want the photograph of the lion in the jail.”

At a news conference, the mayor said the Bow River “looks like an ocean” and described watching the Elbow River spill over the top of a dam in Calgary, which has a metropolitan population of 1.2 million.

As the rain continued, the city began expanding the evacuation of the downtown early Friday afternoon.

About 1,200 troops were sent to southern Alberta to help with flood relief and Edmonton, the province’s more northern capital, which is unaffected by the rain, sent police officers to assist their counterparts in Calgary.

Several smaller communities sustained substantial property damage, including houses swept away by streams and rivers.

Martha McCallum, who owns a hiking and yoga business in the mountain resort town of Canmore, Alberta, said that flooding on the Trans-Canada Highway and a railway line had made it impossible to leave town. The property surrounding several houses along a normally docile creek had been washed away, she said, and rising floodwaters were less than two feet from the top of a berm protecting her neighborhood.

“You look down the creek and you see all the houses have their foundations exposed,” Ms. McCallum said. “We can still get uphill, but we can’t get very far.”

The police in High River were using borrowed pleasure boats to evacuate people from houses and large pieces of farm machinery, like combine harvesters, to rescue people in some rural towns.

After trees and other debris dislodged by flooding broke a sour gas pipeline on Thursday, residents of Turner Valley, Alberta, were evacuated or told to stay indoors. If inhaled, sour gas, which contains hydrogen sulfide, can cause injury or death.