The majestic Rocky Mountains are a sight to behold from the town of High River. About 60 kilometres south of Calgary, the town is appreciably closer to the front ranges, making them appear just that much bigger. It’s early June, and a late winter has left the peaks covered in pristine, white snow.

But after the spring of 2013, High Riverites will never look at those snow-covered mountains the same way again. To them, that snow is another flood waiting to happen. As the anniversary of last year’s flood approaches, nerves are running almost as high as the water table.

“The snowfall in the mountains this year is higher than it’s ever been,” says Oliver Perry. The 95-year-old has called High River home since 1929, serving the fire department for 37 years, 10 of them as chief. He knows the Highwood about as well as anyone can. “We’ve got a lot of snow in the mountains, and we’ve got an awful lot water that’s going to come down. We’re getting prepared for it here.”

As climbing global temperatures bring more frequent extreme weather events with them, it’s not a question of whether the Highwood will flood again, but how bad it will be when it does; not how to prevent it, but how to minimize its impact. But that’s where the discussion usually stops. Many in town are hesitant to draw a connection between last year’s flooding and so-called global warming. Though many recognize that weather patterns are changing and see last year’s flood as a portent of things to come, the focus of recovery efforts in southern Alberta has been almost exclusively on adaptation to that change, not its stoppage or reversal.

Maybe it’s the region’s ties to the oil and gas industry. Maybe the scientists aren’t doing enough to be heard. Maybe it’s just the quiet Western stoicism. But whatever the reason, few in High River seem willing to call this what climate scientists say it is: a direct, real-world, long-predicted consequence of anthropogenic climate change. It’s simply not part of the public discourse, and without that widespread acknowledgement, it’s only the symptoms that are being treated — not the disease.

The Highwood has flooded many times before, but never has it wreaked so much destruction as in 2013. After record-breaking rainfall in the Rockies last June, the Bow River basin experienced severe flooding — the worst on record. Communities throughout southern Alberta were inundated with more water than anyone currently living has ever experienced. Canmore’s Cougar Creek spewed massive glacial till across the Trans Canada Highway. Downtown Calgary stood empty as the Stampede grounds and the Saddledome were slowly but steadily submerged. All told, the flood resulted in as much as $5 billion of estimated damage, the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history. Five people were killed, and as many as 100,000 were displaced from their homes.

Though coverage of Calgary dominated the news, no other community in the province was affected so completely as High River. At the height of the flood, the booming agricultural service town of about 13,000 was almost completely underwater. The entire town was evacuated, blockaded by RCMP for over a week before the water receded enough to begin allowing people to return home.

As the river’s rage subsided, so too did the coverage. But High River is nowhere near back to its pre-flood self. Eleven months later, many houses and businesses still sit in various states of disrepair. More than 200 displaced people still live in Saddlebrook, an isolated trailer park north of town established in July as temporary housing. Two entire neighbourhoods have been all but abandoned, bought out by the provincial government. The downtown district, a ghost town until recently, is being torn up for infrastructure repair. Dump trucks, bulldozers and workers in safety vests and hardhats move incessantly to and fro like ants, scrambling to repair and construct the many dikes and berms engineers hope will prevent such an event from being so devastating in the future.

And all the while, that late mountain snow pack looms in the distance.

Bill Monette used to watch TV news coverage of similar natural disasters around the world, like this year’s flooding in Manitoba, and not relate. But after losing his riverside home, dealing protractedly with governments and owners as president of his condo board, and eventually leaving town altogether, he now feels a profound affinity for those similarly affected. He knows the disaster itself is only the first part of the story.

“It’s going to continue for them,” he says. “It’s all the other things that go on afterwards.”

It’s a Thursday afternoon in early May, and two of Marg Darling’s friends, Fred Plotnikoff and his wife Bert Ager, have stopped by Marg’s new condo for a visit. Before the flood, the three were acquainted as neighbours in the Willows, the condo complex of which Bill was the board president. The 42-unit complex, built in 2004, sat along the Highwood River on the north edge of town in a neighbourhood known as Wallaceville. Though not the richest part of town, its proximity to the river made it a picturesque place to call home.

Many Willows residents — Marg, Bert and Fred included — were retirees. After the shared experience of losing their homes and living together in the trailers of Saddlebrook, the three have become close friends. “If anything positive came out of it, it was that,” says Fred. “We sort of bonded together through these times, all of us.”

“I think with people getting together and just laughing off the problems — it’s like therapy,” says Marg. Talking with other people who experienced the flood helps these three friends stay sane.

Marg, Bert and Fred were evacuated from their riverside homes on June 20, 2013. When Marg was finally allowed back to her unit early that July, she was greeted by bright red sign on her door: “Uninhabitable.”

“My heart just sunk,” she recalls. “I had just moved to High River a year before that. My husband passed away, I was retired, my life was going to go on in High River. And it was just like overnight, everything changed.”

“Seeing the sign on the door was not the half of it,” Fred chimes in. He describes the heaps of ruined household items that were common sights in High River that summer as people cleaned out their homes. “In front of everybody’s place, it was just heaps of garbage…. In front of your house, there’s a pile of your furniture all scrapped up, covered in mud. That’s your life.”

It was clear that no one would be moving back into the Willows anytime soon. Carpets were caked with silt. Floorboards were warped. Walls were starting to mould. So, in the meantime, condo residents had to find somewhere else to stay. Some found accommodations with friends and family; some found rentals in nearby towns; and some, including Marg, Bert and Fred, found themselves in the newly established Saddlebrook.

Marg has finally found a new condo on the east side of High River. It’s smaller than her unit in the Willows, but it’s a place to call her own. Fred and Bert, however, haven’t been quite as lucky. They’ve been living in a 10-by-30-foot trailer in Saddlebrook for almost 10 months. Though they have nothing but praise for the staff and community, they’re starting to get a little stir-crazy. They feel cut off from the rest of town — the trailer park is about 15 kilometres north, near the Cargill meat packing plant, a major source of employment in High River.

Fred and Bert have been asked by Saddlebrook staff to find alternate accommodations by July 1, and though they’ve finally found a new place, it wasn’t easy. Even after the province eventually bought out their Wallaceville condo, they had trouble finding anything suitable in their price range. Basement suites abound, but Bert has trouble climbing stairs — and after last year, the pair are understandably wary of living in a basement suite. Their situation is not uncommon in High River, a town with about 3,000 pre-flood residents over the age of 65.

So, with all that trauma so fresh and the selection of housing so poor, why come back to High River at all? Why risk going through something so devastating again? Why face the constant reminders of the boarded-up shops, the half-demolished homes, the businesses and local government departments still being run out of tents?

When posed the question, the three look around the table at each other briefly and answer almost in unison. “Home,” they say. “It’s home.”

It’s hard to say how many High Riverites share the sentiment. Solid numbers are hard to come by, but the town estimates its current population to be somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000; before the flood, that number was just shy of 13,000. Almost a year later, thousands of people are either not back in their homes or have left altogether.

Despite their fondness for High River and their continued desire to call it home, the three friends are aware of the pervasive feeling of anxiety in town. People may put on a brave face, but as the first anniversary of the flood draws ever closer, many are nervous. The Highwood typically hits its peak annual flow in early June, and the town feels like it’s drawing its collective breath in anticipation. Though they can see the dikes and berms being built, some are hesitant to begin rebuilding in earnest until they see how this year’s flood season plays out.

“I guess deep down inside, [we feel] that the town is going to come back,” says Fred. “Deep down inside, we want it to come back. But we don’t know if it will. We’ll wait until this June, I guess.”

It’s no real mystery why High River flooded so badly last spring. As most people in town can tell you, an abnormally large storm system parked itself over the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies, unloading record-breaking amounts of rain for several days. An unusually late snow pack compounded the problem. Warm rain melted the alpine snow as it fell, turning tiny seasonal creeks into raging torrents of water and gravel, carving new canyons and washing out highways throughout the region. All told, three times the average monthly amount of rain fell in three days.

By the morning of June 20, the Highwood River had broken its banks, and the water was still coming. The flood of a century, they were calling it. The flood of a lifetime.

But was it? Not even close.

Statistical analysis by John Pomeroy, who holds the Canada Research Chair in water resources and climate change, suggests that June 2013 represented a one-in-45-year event in Calgary, and a mere one-in-32-year event in Banff and Canmore, just north of the Highwood’s headwaters. In other words, most of us will see another rainfall event of this magnitude in our lifetimes.

But the one-in-X-number-of-years framework is a problematic way of looking at flooding events, because it defines events in relation to historical extremes — and as global temperatures continue to rise, those extremes have been increasing.

“We’ve known for a long time that the hydrology in Canada is on the move, that water is moving more energetically through the hydrologic cycle,” says Bob Sandford, a Canmore-based water policy expert and director of the Western Watersheds Research Collaborative. “Warmer temperatures are energizing that cycle.”

It’s basic physics: warmer air can hold more water vapour, which means more rain. A 2013 study conducted by researchers from the University of Adelaide found a seven per cent increase in extreme rainfall event intensity for every degree of atmospheric warming. Given that global temperatures are projected to increase anywhere from three to five degrees by the end of the 21st century, we could be in for a lot more rain in the years to come.

This is something scientists have long anticipated. Mel Reasoner, a climate scientist based in Nelson, B.C., has analyzed historical rainfall data for a number of communities in interior B.C. as part of his work with the Columbia Basin Trust, and has found similar stories wherever he looks.

“In the last few years, [the daily maximum] has really been spiking,” he says. “The records for June are off the charts as well in many cases. And this is entirely within what the models have been projecting. In fact, it seems to be happening a bit more rapidly.”

Historical rainfall data from a weather station in Kananaskis, near the headwaters of the Highwood, is revealing. “There’s [been] an increase in frequency of these extreme events,” Reasoner says. “There were maybe four between 1939 and 1980, and then there’s been six since then. But on top of that, there’s these two that totally blow the record away. June 19, 2013, is 157 millimetres, and June 5, 2005, is 129. If that trend continues, the outcome is really bad.”

But even with the 2013 flood fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s still hard to convince people that climate change is real and its effects are upon us. While many High Riverites have noticed the increase in extreme weather, few are inclined to say it’s the result of global warming, chalking it up instead to natural cycles and variability. “Climate change refugee” is not a phrase most Saddlebrook residents would use to describe themselves.

“This should be a wakeup call,” Reasoner says. “Often [as a climate change proponent] you’re dismissed as being alarmist, but the problem is, when I look at this graph, I’m not being alarmist — the data is alarming.”

Despite what the discourse in mainstream media might lead one to believe, there is very little dispute in the climate science community: climate change is real. It’s already happening, and it’s driven by human activity. As the fossil fuels we burn release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, temperatures increase around the world, and extreme rainfall events are only one of the predicted consequences.

But even as these consequences become more apparent, many are still reluctant to acknowledge their causes — perhaps nowhere more so than Alberta, says Sandford, a province built on oil wealth.

“The psyche of this province has been torqued out of shape by the need to justify and defend the choice to have the oil sands as a major pillar in our economic future,” Sandford says. “Anything that impinges on that, especially matters related to climate, cause people a lot of grief. And they’re often resisted outrightly, or even attacked.

“This is the one place in the country that is so backwards in its understanding of climate issues that it’s almost embarrassing to come back to this place.”

As one might surmise from the name, High River has a history with water. First incorporated as a village in 1901, it sits on an old lake bed along the Highwood River, a tributary of the Bow. Residents have been experiencing floods here since even before the town’s official inception. The river, which flows south to north, was essential for industry in the area, but the flooding was a constant problem. The Lineham sawmill, on the north side of town, was a particular hot spot.

Photos from historical floods are strikingly similar to images from 2013. A photo from 1912 shows a farmer delivering milk from his dairy, water touching the bottom of his wagon. Another from 1923 shows several men in front of the train station in a canoe.

But a funny thing happened in the latter half of the 20th century: despite a few close calls, there wasn’t any major flooding to speak of. After 1942, the town settled into a comparative dry spell that lasted more than 50 years. By the early 1950s, houses were already being built on the former site of the Lineham sawmill work camps, by then called Wallaceville. The town was growing faster than ever before, positively booming through the 1970s and ‘80s. Life was good in High River. By 1995, the population had almost quintupled since the last major flood.

It’s understandable, then, that when the Highwood broke its banks that June, residents were caught rather off guard.

Perry, the retired fire chief, is one of a select few High Riverites who can still remember the volatile river the Highwood was in the first half of the century. A resident for 85 years, Perry’s work often involved dealing with the river. He has learned how to anticipate floods based on weather conditions and flow rates upstream, and still keeps in touch with his friends along the river’s tributaries in the foothills.

“If you grew up in High River and you know all about the floods, you’re conscious of it. You’re always looking ahead,” Perry says. “[But] we’ve got so many new people coming into town that have never seen a flood. Then the floods come and they wonder what the hell happened to them. [They say,] ‘Why didn’t somebody take precautions on this and warn us?’”

In the 1970s, Perry participated in a hydrologic survey of the Highwood River. The survey identified seven potential sites for dams and other storage facilities that would allow for control of the river’s flow during peak times in the spring, as well as controlled release later in the summer when water levels are typically low. But nothing substantial ever came from it; it was written off, Perry says, as a pipe dream. At the time, the threat didn’t seem to warrant the cost.

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” he says. “Everybody’s got different ideas about the river and all the things that could happen.”

People have short memories. In only a short half-century without a major flood, there were now more than 60 residences in Wallaceville, with a new condo complex, the Willows, already slated for construction.

The 1995 flood was a shocker, to be sure, as was 2005's repeat performance. But the worst was yet to come.

It’s easy to say in hindsight that maybe a town, or a least parts of it, shouldn’t have been built where they were, but that doesn’t change the fact that 10,000 people still want to call High River home. So what’s to be done?

This spring, High River is a hive of construction activity, and Reiley McKerracher is at the centre of it. Promoted after the flood from High River’s manager of engineering to manager of renewal operations, he oversees every dike, berm or other flood-related construction project in town. More than seven kilometres of dike is being constructed, with the goal of withstanding last year’s flow rates plus a metre of safety. Roads, lift stations and other damaged infrastructure are being repaired. The province has announced $600 million of funding over the next three years for flood mitigation projects in the region, and is planning a diversion channel to reroute water south of town, a project that will take years to complete.

It’s a massive undertaking, and its urgency is not lost on those involved. “Our capital budget program for what we’re doing dwarfs what we would typically do in terms of capital projects in a year,” McKerracher says. “We’ve done multiyear projects in a matter of months. It’s amazing what we’ve got done.”

It’s engineering at its finest, but it undeniably changes the character of the river — and points to another wrinkle in the story of why the 2013 flood was so devastating.

For Sandford and his colleagues, heavy rainfall is only part of the explanation. It’s not just that there is more water coming down the river — there are also more people and structures along it. High River’s population has almost doubled since the 1995 flood, and before the 2013 flood was projected to double again in 25 years. But it’s not just the people and their houses that are problematic.

“What we’ve done in urban environments is we’ve hard-surfaced everything,” Sandford says. “You cut down forests, you lay down roads, you put pavement everywhere, you put concrete everywhere, and you lose an enormous amount of the absorptive capacity of the landscape.”

McKerracher doesn’t disagree. “We’ve taken away quite a bit of storage by diking off the town,” he says. “By taking away the storage in town, we’ve actually increased flows to downstream users to the north.” The town is currently discussing solutions for this increased flow with province.

The result of all this engineering, Sandford says, is that otherwise-ordinary storms can now cause extraordinary flooding, simply because the water no longer has anywhere else to go. This means our flood maps are out of date and our prediction systems are inaccurate — and more people are in harm’s way than ever.

“We have an incomplete analysis of what’s happening, and I don’t feel that we’re better prepared now than we were last year,” he says. “A lot more of the latest breakthroughs in hydrologic research have to be incorporated into professional engineering practice if we’re going to be able to manage to adapt to these circumstances.”

According to Sandford, we can’t just dike our way out of this. We need a more holistic approach that takes the entire watershed into consideration. We need to replace that lost storage capacity. We need areas that can flood in high water situations without endangering people or property. We need to return some land to the river.

As it turns out, that’s easier said than done.

Jamie Kinghorn, a former High River town councillor, stands outside the Wallaceville house he’s owned since 1997. There’s a Canadian flag waving proudly on the front porch, a tree planted in the backyard for each of his three children, and a cozy campfire pit along the riverbank surrounded by chairs. Apart from a bit of scattered debris and telltale river mud, it looks like a very comfortable place to call home.

Across the street, however, is a very different story. One house lists precariously on its exposed foundation. Several others sit in various states of collapse, doors and windows boarded up, left essentially untouched since the flood.

The reason is that the provincial government has — with the exception of Kinghorn’s and a handful of others — bought them all. The area has been designated a floodway and is being, as the refrain has become, returned to the river.

It’s a decision Kinghorn isn’t happy with. “These aren’t just structures,” he says. “These are people’s homes that have been here for a long time.”

In the immediate aftermath of the flood, the High River town council on which Kinghorn sat made it clear: their goal was to protect the entire town from flooding of the magnitude seen in 2013, and to do it in time for next year’s spring thaw. Work began almost immediately; the dust from the first rounds of home cleanup had barely settled when the dust from the first new projects began to stir.

But Wallaceville, which experienced severe flooding in 2013, was proving to be a problem. Since the shuttering of the old Lineham sawmill, a sizable neighbourhood had sprung up on the former site of the mill’s work camps — including the Willows, completed in 2004, and an 11-unit affordable housing complex. Wallaceville’s northern location means it sits downstream from the rest of High River, and anything that affects the river elsewhere in town affects Wallaceville. It’s a textbook example of the problems Sandford says current land use patterns cause.

In the fall of 2013, Kinghorn ran for mayor, but lost to Craig Snodgrass. Snodgrass and his mostly new council took somewhat of a different view from their predecessors on what “protecting the entire town” would look like. As the engineers completed their analysis, it became clear there wasn’t a quick fix for Wallaceville.

According to the engineers, the once-scenic neighbourhood would require a 10-foot dike all the way around it to withstand flooding of last year’s magnitude — a dike that would be 20 feet wide at the base. McKerracher likens it to putting the entire community in a giant dirt bowl. Not only would it be expensive and an eyesore, it would also be a safety hazard, hindering access by emergency services and causing extreme damage if it ever failed.

“When we looked at what would be involved to protect [Wallaceville], and we looked at what kind of community would be left … it just didn’t make sense to try and protect it,” McKerracher says.

In turned out to be about the same price to simply have the province buy all 107 Wallaceville residences and leave the area at the mercy of the river. The added floodway also lowered the required height of several other dikes in town as much as half a metre. So, with the first snows of winter threatening to fly, the town took its plan to the province. Finally, on Dec. 23, it was announced that the province would offer an optional buyout to all Wallaceville property owners at tax-assessed value.

For the neighbourhood’s former residents, the decision was far too long in coming. Bill Monette, president of the Willows condo board, and his wife Leigh have been involved in the process since day one, dealing with residents, insurance companies and various levels of government. They were repeatedly told the Willows was a special case, which complicated the insurance and rebuilding process immensely. Until recently, the couple were renting in not-particularly-nearby Strathmore, feeling like they were living in limbo. No one could move back into the Willows, but until the government decided how and if they would be compensated, they couldn’t walk away, either.

“[The government] would promise something [the] next week, so then I would write everybody,” Bill says. “Well, next week came and nothing had happened. OK, well, it’s another week. And it just seemed like you get your hopes up and down and up and down all the way along, and it’s hard to do that for a long period of time.”

Bill and Leigh say it’s an expropriation in everything but name. The distinction is important, because under the provincial expropriation act, landowners are owed assessed value plus 10 to 15 per cent to bring it up to market value, plus moving and legal costs. By framing it instead as an optional buyout, the government only has to pay assessed value. But it’s not really option, Bill says: either take the buyout or live in an all-but-abandoned floodplain — land the town has explicitly counted on acting as a spillway in future floods.

“There’s probably three or four residents that have said they want to stay, so they’re free to do that,” says Tom Neufeld, a spokesperson for the province. “The government has never said they’re going to expropriate them, but the government has also said that if a flood comes, we’re not going to build a berm or a dike around your property. I mean, you will have to deal with it.”

Kinghorn was ready to do just that. “To live along the river is a great thing, but there’s extra costs involved,” he says. “We were prepared to deal with that, to do the work that we needed to do to protect our property and our homes.”

He says he would take the buyout if he was offered what he considers to be a fair deal: appraised value (rather than assessed value), plus 10 per cent for moving and legal costs. But the government has indicated that its offer is not open to negotiation, and it doesn’t appear to be in any particular rush to get Kinghorn and the other handful of remaining residents out of the neighbourhood, either.

Homeowners are finally starting to see their buyout money, but the future of Wallaceville remains unclear. Many of Wallaceville’s estimated 250 former residents have left town altogether — including Bill and Leigh, who have moved south to Lethbridge.

“It was just like living in a park,” Leigh recalls. She and Bill had only been there since 2010, and were looking forward to beginning the next phase of their life together in High River after moving from Calgary in 2010 and retiring in 2012. “We loved it. And High River was a wonderful community. We never felt so welcomed and part of a community as we have felt in High River.”

But the Highwood had other plans.

Bill and Leigh both agree that returning Wallaceville to the river is the right decision in the long run; it’s the overly political and bureaucratic execution they’re unhappy with. “[Politicians’] first focus is to get elected again,” says Bill, “and their second focus is to try to keep the budget within a budget, and then somewhere down that line is to actually help somebody.”

“They need to get their boots on the ground [next time],” says Leigh. “I think the decision-makers needed to come and see what the people were living with and what they were going through.”

For the new mayor Snodgrass, what happened in Wallaceville is a powerful lesson for those keen to build near the Highwood.

“We’ve got to develop a lot smarter and not be crawling up the river’s ass every chance we get to put a development along the river,” he says. “We’re making good on some mistakes we’ve made in the past in High River just because we had 10 or 20 years of not having high water events, and now that we do, we’ve got to correct the mistakes. That’s all it is.”