A door-to-door wellness report conducted in Bragg Creek in 2014 has revealed that there is still work to be done to help the community recover from devastation caused by the 2013 flooding.
At the Policy and Priorities Committee meeting on May 5, Co-Chair of the Bragg Creek Area Wellness Committee (BCAWC) Eric Howey presented the results of the report to council as information.
Formed as a partnership between social service providers and local organizations, Howey said the BCAWC is unaffiliated with any governing agency.
“We are an interdisciplinary group of professionals who meet once a month, and our mandate is to undertake initiatives that will support the social wellness of the community of Bragg Creek,” he said. “This report stemmed from a general concern for the community.”
The door-to-door survey was concentrated on the core of the hamlet, and was modelled after a survey completed in High River following the flooding there. According to Howey, the group hoped to draw comparisons between the findings of both reports – and he said they were able to identify some key differences.
“When we asked residents about the number of services they access most, in (the) community of High River they saw an average of 2.4 services per home,” said Howey. “These are things like Habitat for Humanity, Canadian Red Cross, primary care doctor and mental health counsellors.”
In Bragg Creek, however, the average number of accessed services was reported to be only 0.9 per home, which Howey said is a “notable gap.” Post-flood, the High River report indicated that 61 per cent of residents accessed Red Cross for support, compared to only 16 per cent of Bragg Creek residents.
The Disaster Recovery Program (DRP) saw similar results – 43 per cent of High River residents and only 18 per cent of Bragg Creek resident accessed services.
“These are some pretty big differences in terms of accessing supports between these two communities, and while I can’t speak to exactly why that gap exists, I think High River has had a lot of help in terms of engaging support for that community,” Howey said.
According to Howey, because High River was evacuated and re-entry was a controlled process, residents were met with help upon their return to the community and provided with wellness resources in a way that “wasn’t threatening.”
“Someone who has never been in a car accident before and then gets into their first accident, it changes that activity for them from something that was perceived to have no risk,” Howey said. “It’s a similar thing in Bragg Creek – it’s not just a benign river flowing through the community anymore, now, there is some risk associated with it.”
The uncertainty of flood mitigation within the community was another issue that was repeatedly mentioned in the survey results, and Howey said it shows that the community’s sense of safety is not only “really important” to residents, but that it is still compromised after the flood.
“It’s not up to (our group) to say how that should be addressed, but that (the report) is something the people of Bragg Creek need to move forward with their lives,” he said.
