The bill is growing as the cleanup continues from last week's snowstorm and the city says damages could be in the millions.
The piles of broken branches continue to grow at drop off points around the city as Calgarians and city crews cleanup from an early dump of snow that shattered trees across the city.
The landfills are also filling up and the city says the snowfall took out power to more people than last year’s floods.
“In the Calgary floods we had approximately 30,000 people without power, this event, eliminated power to 50,000 residents. In the Calgary flood, over the fourteen days, we had 13,000 calls into our 311 system, we have had 27,000 in 72 hours with this event,” said Tom Sampson, Deputy Chief of Calgary’s Emergency Management Agency.
Sampson says this was the greatest snowfall for the month of September in 132 years.
“Our waste and recycling folks say that they’ve got roughly $2M worth of chipping to be done. Furthermore from a debris management plan, it’s costing us about $750,000 a week in terms of our operations and our parks department is spending roughly $2.3M a week cleaning up,” said Sampson.
As much as 80 percent of the city's public trees have been damaged or destroyed and it could take six months to clean up the mess.
“Lots and lots and lots of money so far. We are just beginning our conversations with the province around disaster relief funding and so on, for now we’re covering everything under existing budgets but this is certainly damage well into the millions,” said Mayor Nenshi.
Most parks in the city remain closed because of dangerous hanging branches and tree debris.
For more information on tree cleanup and where to take debris, click HERE.
