Heavy rains throughout the night turned into the kind of flooding the RM of Swan Valley West hasn’t seen in decades, according to their Reeve, and the damage will take weeks if not months to fully overcome.
What started as worries of a tornado in the area turned into flooding concerns very quickly. Not only did they receive six inches of rain themselves to begin with, but a lot of water rolling downhill at them effectively turned into a flash flood on the morning of Monday, June 8.
“About 24 hours ago it was hot and humid here and we were wondering if we were going to get a tornado or not,” said Bill Gade, Reeve of the RM of Swan Valley West. “We spent the night watching thunderstorms, as did everyone in WestMan, to see where tornados ended up. We had some tornado warnings, we thought that would be the end of it and we could go to bed, and then it started to rain.”
According to Gade, the rain didn’t let up for hours and places at higher elevation got eight to ten inches of it. And eventually, that water higher up did what water in high places often does: it tried to get lower down.
“If you can imagine ten inches of water over hundreds of square miles, that’s an awful lot of water,” Gade said. “And it’s all running downhill as fast as it can go.”
The result were immediate and devastating. Roads were completely washed away and residents ended up stranded in their homes or vehicles, prompting a style of rescue that local fire crews had trained for but never really expected to use.
“We spent hours today doing water rescues with our fire department, and I have to say that’s a first for us,” Gade explained. “We have never done water rescues for flood victims before here. But we’ve been out in several places for that, taking the boat out and in some places some heavy equipment.”
And there were the road washouts. Dozens of them. Gade said he lost count of the sheer number of roads that had been swept away by rain.
“At last count, Manitoba Highways has 18 or 20 closures in the area for their roads,” he said. “Many of our roads are simply missing. They’re not there anymore. People think of a road washout, ‘Oh, there’s some water over it, when it goes down we can drive.’ That’s not necessarily the case. The road is missing. It’s not there anymore. We’re going to have to rebuild it from scratch.”
Those road washouts are accompanied by destruction of several rail lines in the area (Gade said he knew of eight or ten such places) and it all adds up to a long list of work ahead for the RM. There was a slight saving grace of having relatively few power losses (something the neighbouring RM of Minitonas was not so fortunate with) but the work ahead is nonetheless extensive.
“If we had one road washed out, we’d get the pieces, we’d start in on it, and we’d be a day or two to fix that one road,” said Gade. “We’ve got 20 of those, multiply it out, even if we get a couple of crews going, we’re looking at a month or two to recover from this. We’ll go to the most important ones first, try to get it so people can get to work and get to hospitals and the things they need to be at, but it’s going to take most of the summer to recover from this.”
According to Gade, the biggest flood his community had seen in living memory was in 1988, and people he knew who were present for that said this flood was worse. Beyond 1988, no one can recall any flood of this magnitude, which makes it difficult to prepare for any others.
“I think this is a one-in-one-hundred, or better, event today. Last time we saw anything like this was 1988 and we’re almost two feet higher today than we were then… A lot of those questions, I don’t know if there are answers to. There’s only so much we can do.”
Gade added that he was proud of how professionally his fire crews handled themselves and how many people they were able to rescue.
