Hay River’s Red McBryan – former mayor, road builder and community icon – patrols the riverbanks in a face-off against the flood. By Jessa Gamble
In the spring of 1963, Red McBryan, Hay River’s then-mayor, was all set to blow up his town’s namesake river. It was his yearly flood-prevention ritual, involving a crew of six bombsmen and 180 kilos of dynamite. “Oh, we used to blast the hell out of the river,” says McBryan with the mischievous smile of a boy who likes to see things explode. “I’d get phone calls saying, ‘My windows are shaking! You trying to blow my damn house up?’” But a message from a territorial official that May morning snuffed the fuse; there wasn’t money in the budget to blast the river that year. McBryan was furious. “I hope to hell it floods!” he remembers shouting. Weeks later, it did – worse than ever, submerging the town in murky water and driving out most of the residents. The deluge carved a deep channel in McBryan’s memory, and decades later, at age 87, he remains at the ready, Hay River’s unofficial-yet-unfailing flood-watcher.
The territorial government, over the years, has learned to listen to McBryan. Even by 1963, they should have: he already had plenty of experience with the perils of the North’s spring break-up. He’d been “up in this country” for a quarter-century, having come north from Edmonton, his birthplace, at age 17. He lived first in Yellowknife, where he worked underground at Giant Mine and met his wife, Bertha; then, in the mid-1940s, Hay River beckoned with top-notch schooling for their soon-to-be eight children. McBryan won a solid job with the highways division, working there until he retired in 1988. Over his years with the division -- and as town councillor, then mayor, then member of the NWT Council, which pre-dated the legislative assembly -- he says he acquired a nodding acquaintance with every roadside tree and rock in the southern NWT.
McBryan also acquired a less-friendly acquaintance with the perennial Hay River flood. Perched on low banks just shy of where the river splits into two channels and empties into Great Slave Lake, the NWT’s second-biggest town is in a prime location not just for transport and fishing – its raison d’être – but also for serious springtime disaster. A six-foot ice-ridge forms at the edge of Great Slave Lake through the winter and stays in place long after the Hay River has broken up. Year after year, the river, swollen with meltwater, collides with this barrier. “She comes barreling past us like the Berlin Express,” McBryan says. “She hits that sheet of ice like a flock of sheep hitting a fence.” Unable to flow further, the river rises fast -- threatening to drown both Hay River and Katl'odeeche, the adjacent Hay River Reserve.
It was as mayor that McBryan began combatting this phenomena. Each spring he would blow a channel through the ice-barrier so the river could flush into the deep water of the lake. And when he couldn’t bomb – in 1963 – all hell broke loose. As he pilots his pickup along the roads of Hay River’s low-lying Vale Island it’s as though he’s re-living the scene. “This was all under water,” he says with a gesture that encompasses the buildings, now built to code high on pilings, and the road, which McBryan spent most of his working-life building and maintaining. “And here’s where we lost a man. His canoe rolled over. Hell of a thing,” he says. His language is rough, yet he speaks thoughtfully and listens carefully, straining to overcome the damage done by long service near loud machinery. His earnest expression is formed by sparse eyebrows furrowed on a craggy face. The flood, he says, was just the nightmare he’d predicted. “The son of a gun can flood quick. Nothing you can do. Comes over the sides and you have to get in your vehicle and get the hell out.”
When it was clear the town was in danger and a full evacuation was under way, McBryan made a last-ditch plea to the Canadian air force, asking if they could bomb the river. His call was treated as an impulsive request from a madman. The patient and, in retrospect, surprising reply was that the air force had no bombs of its own. “Oh, I was mad as hell,” remembers McBryan. The flood destroyed so much of the waterfront property that the residential district and downtown core had to be shifted away from Vale Island to its current location on higher ground further inland.
Nowadays, to prevent a recurrence, McBryan monitors the river for a 400-kilometre stretch south of the town, conducting a six-stop snow survey in March to measure depth and water content, calling in the conditions to the town offices and the reserve. Then he’s on the road every day during breakup, watching for ice jams in locations he knows are risky – narrowings and abrupt turns.
With warmer winters nowadays, he says, the ice doesn’t thicken like it used to – a mere 30 inches compared to the four feet of yore, which makes a crucial difference to spring water levels. Still, his efforts have not gone unnoticed. For his years of flood-watching and municipal service, he says “some smartass in council” named a main street after him.
Jessa Sinclair is Up Here’s associate editor. She received ridiculously warm hospitality in Hay River.
