City crews out in force to deal with branches, clogged drains

By Lethbridge Herald on June 24, 2025.

Herald photo by Alejandra Pulido-Guzman City employees clean up a tree that collapsed during the weekend's storm Monday afternoon at Henderson Lake Park.

Alejandra Pulido-Guzman
Lethbridge Herald

After a weekend filled with rain and wind, the City of Lethbridge is sharing some highlights of what it did to make sure the city kept running smoothly. 

Leanne Lammertsen, water and wastewater operations manager with the City of Lethbridge, told media Monday that the city began to prepare for the storm on Tuesday of last week and worked throughout the week, to make sure everything was set in place for the weekend. 

“We worked really hard on Wednesday and Thursday to get any open excavations closed,” said Lammersten. “We did a whole bunch of paving on Thursday to get our holes sealed up so they could weather the storm.”

She added that on Thursday and Friday crews cleared catch basins in anticipation of heavy rain. 

“And on Saturday when the rain came, we had crews going around the city, looking for problem areas and clearing whatever they saw.”

She said it was a busy weekend, but crews were set up well to deal with situations. They were equipped with rakes and shovels in different areas of the city looking for problems. 

“Saturday night we worked until about 6:30 p.m. and then Sunday was business as usual cleaning up, checking up for any new problems that lasted over the weekend and getting ready for normal work on Monday,” said Lammertsen. 

In 2020 the city developed a process for rain event response and this weekend was the first time they had an opportunity to use it. 

“It was a really good exercise,” said Lammersten. “We were really lucky that the rain was steady and gradual through the day, and there weren’t any blasts of rain that filled up underpasses or anything to make the response very difficult.”

The wastewater treatment plant saw significantly increased flows and the City called in extra people to make sure that everything worked properly. 

“They did a really good job at treating all the extra flow that was coming to the plant and there were no big catastrophes at either plant,” said Lammertsen. 

Now that the storm has passed, she said they will focus on reviewing their response to the storm and take a look at what they did well and what needs to improve. 

“There is some work that we can do to improve our process and improve communication.”

As of Monday the system was back to normal, ponds around neighbourhoods were back to normal levels and that is how the system is designed to work, said Lammersten. 

“I think we did an excellent job. We hadn’t had a chance to try out the new process and everything that we laid out worked really well.”

She added that on Sunday afternoon after the storm was past and the wind picked up, there were a lot of trees that had collapsed after two days of rain. 

According to the city, the 311 team received 81 sewer-related and 26 tree-related calls during the storm. 

“This doesn’t mean there were 81 sewer issues and 26 downed trees. The team likely received multiple calls for the same issues,” states the city. 

The city added that the downed trees were on both private and public property.