Last week’s heavy rainfall and warm temperatures caused significant snowmelt and spring runoff across the Ottawa River watershed, leading to a surge in river levels from Pembroke, Ont. to Carillon, Que., as well as along the Ottawa’s tributaries.
In many places, the water exceeded major flood levels, defined by the planning board as the level at which one or several streets are beginning to flood, with several houses and buildings or neighbourhoods being affected.
The Apr. 20 update from the Ottawa River Planning Board (the last before this newspaper went to print) forecasted the levels would peak on Tuesday, Apr. 21, at 113.15 metres above sea level in Pembroke, 108.75 m in Lac Coulonge, and 75.85 m in Chats Lake (Quyon).
These are lower than the 2023 peak levels in Pembroke by 10 cm, equal to that year’s peak levels in Lac Coulonge, and 5 cm lower in Chats Lake.
Historical high levels for Pontiac’s stretch of the Ottawa occurred in mid-May of 2019, when they hit 109.17 m in Lac Coulonge and 76.28 m at Chats Lake.
The Apr. 20 forecast suggested levels would then stabilize and slowly decrease over the second half of the week.
But by Monday morning, levels in many places were already at the previously forecasted peak levels for Tuesday. In Lac Coulonge, for example, the planning board’s forecasted Apr. 21 peak level of 108.60 on the Ottawa River had been reached by the morning of Apr. 20.
“We’ve found that the forecasts are not so accurate,” Fort-Coulonge mayor Pierre Cyr told THE EQUITY. “It’s going to go above 108.60 easily, we’re already there. It’s probably going to be more like 108.80 m. It’s [rising] a centimeter an hour right now. [ . . . ] We’re hoping it’s going to stop increasing but there’s no way of knowing for sure. If the water goes to 109 m, we won’t have time to react if it goes that high.”
On Sunday evening, the municipality issued a state of emergency to expedite its ability to respond to the flood.
“We need extra people and a lot of materials, and financially while you’re under the umbrella of the emergency, it will be partly reimbursed,” Cyr explained, adding that operating within a state of emergency enables the municipality to make quick decisions without having to go to council for approval.
Cyr said his main concerns were preventing the flood waters from entering the town’s sewage system, and reducing strain on the water filtration system.
“If the water passes over the roads [ . . . ] it will make our waste and sewage system useless. Then we would have to evacuate the people and it would cause a lot of problems in the basements.” Cyr said, noting the municipality is building several sand dykes in key locations to prevent water from entering its sewage system.
“And the other concern is the water treatment for potable water. Right now it’s having a hard time pumping the water from the river, not because there’s not enough but because there’s a lot of debris and fine particles in the water that impacts the capacity of filtration for it to be potable.”
For this reason, Fort-Coulonge and Mansfield municipalities are asking residents to reduce consumption of drinking water until the end of the flood, to ease pressure on the towns’ water treatment plants.
Over the weekend, the Municipality of Mansfield-et-Pontefract gave evacuation orders to 70 residents and cottagers from streets that had been flooded over the weekend.
“If they need a place to live, well we can fix that, temporarily,” said mayor Sandra Armstrong. On Monday she said unlike neighbouring Fort-Coulonge, Mansfield was not planning to declare a state of emergency.
“Right now we have our emergency plan, we’re using that, and we’re still in our spending budget, so I think right now at 10:34 a.m. on Monday morning, we’re still good with our plan.”
‘Wait and see’ now a spring routine
As water levels crept up onto lawns and threatened basements last week, Pontiac residents from Luskville to Sheenboro were hard at work filling sand bags, building dikes and otherwise preparing their homes and properties to withstand possible flooding.
At Le Patro de Fort-Coulonge/Mansfield, an outdoor community centre on the banks of the Ottawa River, over 100 students from École secondaire Sieur-de-Coulonge volunteered to help fill sandbags on Friday.
“At 108.5 (metres above sea level) we start to flood,” said Le Patro director Suzie Lavigne, noting the property has flooded every two years since 2017 and no longer benefits from insurance coverage because of its location.
“Each [flooding] event puts our building and equipment in peril, as well as the essential services that we offer to the population,” she wrote in a Facebook post Thursday, calling for community help with filling sand bags.
“We thought we’d try [for help] with the school, and the school sent us around a hundred students. It’s going really well so far,” she said Friday.
Staff and admin were also hard at work assembling and erecting a wooden wall to go inside of the sandbag wall, in case water levels rose above.
“It’s an experiment,” said Jacob Dyelle, who was hard at work putting up the wall. “In 2019, the levels came up to here,” he said, gesturing to a point one-third of the way up a window.
On Monday evening, Lavigne confirmed the various barricades had worked. While Le Patro’s property was largely under water, its infrastructure was protected.
Up the road in Davidson, Kevin Ward spent a large chunk of last week moving belongings out of his basement on rue Thomas-Lefebvre, anticipating the flooding to come.
He uses the basement only for storage, a condition of the flood relief program he benefitted from after the 2019 floods that gave him over $100,000 to raise his house over four feet.
Ward still had to sink about that much of his own money to complete the project, and every year around this time he puts everything on hold, waiting to see where the water levels will land.
“It’s a lot of work, and when it’s all done, you do it in reverse. You put your life on hold for a month to six weeks,” he said on Friday in his basement, which had already begun to accumulate a small pool of water.
It’s hard for Ward to forget what the high water level was – he has markings on his house and garage as a visual reminder of the 2019 floods. The special shelving he’s since built is designed to be above that high water level.
Ward said he has been happy with the municipality’s response to the flooding over the years, making sure people have the right information and are equipped with sandbags. But he said he would like to see better accountability from the Ottawa River dam operators around how the water levels are controlled.
“Between here and Temiskaming, there’s very few dams and there’s a very sparse population. They could have started 10 years ago, put new dams in there and made large holding reservoirs that don’t affect anybody, then all of us here [in the Pontiac] would be a lot better off,” he said.
The frequency of the floods over the past 10 years means that flood preparation has become a spring habit for even the younger Pontiac residents.
On Sunday morning, just east of Quyon, a small team of cottagers and permanent residents were hard at work filling sand bags and building walls for their properties on chemin Kennedy.
Among them were young Luskville residents Brad Arthurs, a Grade 7 student at Pontiac High School, and Marcus Schoo, a Grade 6 student at Onslow. They spent two days shovelling sand to help protect their neighbours’ homes. For Arthurs, this was not his first time preparing for a flood.
“In 2017, my neighbourhood in Luskville was all flooded out and stuff, so we helped. I was young, so I didn’t really know what was going on.”
Bill Laframboise has lived on chemin Kennedy since 2000.
“You get tired of them,” he said of the frequent floods. “They’re saying it might be like 2017, or it might be like 2023, in terms of amounts, so we’ll have to wait and see.”
