The faltering riverbank between 11th Street and Saskatchewan Crescent has prompted city officials to issue a voluntary evacuation request for eight properties.
The bank has had a serious increase in movement – it’s sloping down, and it’s doing so faster than normal. Last year, the slope moved at a rate of milimeters per day. Now officials said it’s moving centimeters each day.
The new slope failure has already moved almost a meter, and at one point moved 20 centimeters one day. Saskatoon’s infrastructure services manager Mike Gutek said it’s still unsure if the slope failure can be fixed.
“What we’re dealing with are very large forces. This is not something I could fix in a weekend with a backhoe, two loads of gravel and some two by fours,” Gutek said.
“To put it in perspective, we’ve got a failure on 17th Street, on Saskatchewan Crescent just downstream, and that work, evaluating analysis and developing a solution is upwards of a three to four million dollar process,” he said.
When asked if people could lose their homes, Gutek said there is enough force moving the bank that some of the foundations of the properties could be affected.
The bulk of the failure is on private property, meaning that the cost to fix the bank currently falls on the property owners. However, an application has been made to the province to declare the slope failure a failure, which could result in provincial assistance to help cover the costs of mending the bank.
For now, the evacuation order is voluntary, but that could change. “If the situation continues to deteriorate, what is now a voluntary order could become a mandatory order,” said Saskatoon City manger, Murray Totland.
Totland explained that the city would have to declare a state of local emergency before they had the power to mandate an evacuation of the area.
The voluntary order doesn’t have an expiry date, and it won’t be lifted until engineers determine the homes are safe from harm from the slope failure.
