Community meeting summary

Emails sent Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Hi everyone,

Thanks to all of you and everyone else who came out last night. It was remarkable to see 500 or more of us standing up for our community (for many of you quite literally standing…). I’m hopeful we got our message across about reducing the risk of future flooding. We may never be able to fight mother nature but simply relying on individual homeowners to reduce the financial impact on government from future floods by asking us to build with cheaper or waterproof materials doesn’t feel like a solution at all.

There are still more questions than answers but I’m an optimistic guy and hope the politicians in the room heard us; I’m not as hopeful for the bureaucrats but in theory at least they shouldn’t carry the day.

We will continue to push hard but as Emma says below we will need a lot of help. I am encouraged by the level of participation and interest we saw last night; we had over 100 people offer to volunteer yesterday alone. Based on this and the turnout last night I live in hope that we will be able to return our community to what it was before the flood. It will take time, but if we stick together we can get there.

We’ll be in touch soon with more information on the Calgary River Communities action group. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to send us your questions and we’ll do our best to get answers for you.

Stay strong.

G.

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for coming. It was hugely important. It is hugely important. I am still processing all the hundreds of things I wish we had done differently and the hundreds of messages I wish I had heard. But we did use our collective voice to say that we cannot allow Calgary to flood again. So many questions we need to keep seeking answers to.

In terms of logistics. Hundreds have signed up to help. And we will need all of you. I am having a database compiled (with the help of Allan Markin's personal office staff) and will be creating a new email account for the Calgary River Communities. We will have a website site set here as quickly as possible. We will also need to have either a budget for an administrative person or we will need volunteers to help with this. Flow of information must keep coming quickly and we must be able to communicate with each other effectively. I hope to have all this set up to some degree before the end of the week. If you can help with that component- please identify yourself.



We will be in touch as soon as we have this new format set up! Please do forward this missive to any you know were there last night.



Emma