CALEB NICKERSON
PONTIAC Nov. 27, 2019
The record-breaking flooding this spring might seem like a distant memory, but for homeowners in Pontiac’s waterfront . . .
communities, it’s an ongoing nightmare.
The Equity spoke with several homeowners in Waltham and Mansfield about their ongoing efforts to receive compensation and return their homes to a liveable condition.
Lisa Danis of Davidson has owned her home on rue Thomas-Lefebvre for the past six years and had to be evacuated in late April when the waters surged. There was extensive damage to the foundation of her home, as well her recently constructed addition.
“In 2017 the water came up to the back of the house, touched a little bit of the basement, but not like this year,” she said. “This year was crazy.”
When she returned in June, her property and home were a complete mess, flotsam covered the lawn and her deck had started to rot. She said it took two months to just clean up, and added that she even lost documents like birth certificates that were stored in her crawl space.
Danis said that her attempts to get compensation from the Ministry of Public Security (MSP) have been challenging, to put it lightly. She applied for compensation in May, but the first response she got back in September asked for additional proof of the date her family evacuated.
“I evacuated the kids first, and when they saw that the dates varied, they … wanted proof that they were in school,” Danis said, adding that she had to show their report cards. “They’re paying so much per person when they’re out of the house. They were out before me and that little detail … it set me back for another while.”
After that, she had to provide additional proof that she wasn’t receiving insurance compensation, setting her file back another few days. She finally received her compensation in late October, but she was already out of pocket for the demolition work she’s done. She said she won’t be able to do any serious work on the home until next year.
“For me, I just got a little chunk of money to renovate,” she said “Well, winter’s here. Everything that needs to be done, as for the structure of the house, has to wait until next spring. What’s going to happen? Am I going to be flooded next spring? I just don’t know.”
She said that getting a hold of contractors for quotes has been a serious challenge, as many are either too busy or are charging a premium for their services. Despite all these challenges, Danis considers herself well-off compared to some of her neighbours, who couldn’t rebuild and are renting apartments while they sort out their living situation.
“A lot of people gave up on their house,” she said. “Some of them did get money, some didn’t … people are really depressed.”
Up the highway in Waltham, Craig Caughey still hasn’t received any compensation, other than the original $600 he got from the Red Cross. His woodstove is blazing and he’s got the radio on, but his kitchen has no sink, just bare pipes and a pump still sitting in its packaging. His furniture sits on bare concrete and
“They’re saying I don’t have legal title to this property, and I’ve been here for 33 years,” he lamented about his troubles with the MSP. “It seems like every time they’re satisfied with the record, they come up with something else.”
Caughey moved into the home in September after spending the summer in a RV in his yard. An Anglophone, he said that without the help of a bilingual neighbour, he would have had even more trouble dealing with the MSP agents on his file, who have changed frequently and aren’t always bilingual.
“Even if I do get the money now, it’s too late to raise the building to their specs, that’s why I went ahead and put in all the drywall, insulation, new plastic and everything,” he said, gesturing to the walls. “Still no word if they’re going to help me or not. It’s unreal. I’ll have to put in the kitchen sink … Hard to say if I should go ahead and do the work or not, then have to go and tear it out anyway to get it jacked up. That’s the problem, everything’s on hold.”
Despite all the challenges, Caughey noted optimistically that he had plenty of moose and deer meat after this fall’s hunt, so at least he wouldn’t go hungry over the winter. When asked what he would say to the provincial authorities, he laughed.
“Nothing you can print, there’d be lots of bleeps,” he said. “I’m fed up with them.”
Down the street, several homes sit up on concrete stilts awaiting a new foundation, a process that Mark Gale and his wife Rhonda Perry are planning for their home. Despite receiving a chuck of their compensation from the MSP, they’re still waiting on a quote from a contractor.
“We did get funding to raise it, but we haven’t got any funding yet to do the foundation … that’s the big expense,” Gale explained. “We’re waiting on estimates. We’ve got one in, but they need two. It’s crazy. I’ve been tracking this [contractor] down for three weeks now.”
In the meantime, he’s redone the insulation on the exterior walls as well as purchased a new furnace and installed three forced air space heaters in different parts of his home. They’ve torn out their deck and garden in preparation for lifting the house, but the work might not get started until the spring.
He said that in combination with their wood stove, and a salamander in the garage they’ve stayed warm so far, but if the mercury plunges, they’ll have to look at other options.
“They’re good for minus 10, 15. Minus 20 the other night was pretty cool, I was kind of worried, but we got lucky that nothing froze,” he said.
Like Danis, Gale counted himself among the lucky ones, as he was still in his home and their file is moving forward, albeit slowly.
“Basically it works out to what we were supposed to get in 2017, so hopefully it doesn’t take two more years to get the rest,” he said with a wry laugh. “They wrapped it in. I don’t know how they do it, it’s confusing. I’m just lucky my wife speaks French, because then it would be that much harder.”
Another resident in the area, who asked to remain anonymous, is currently living in the upstairs of her house with her five children and is still waiting on compensation.
“We’re stuck with mattresses on bedroom floors upstairs,” she said. “We’re all sharing rooms because we went from six bedrooms to three.”
The communication with the MSP has been shoddy, she said, adding that a mistake on her damage report delayed the entire process by a month. They received their damage report at the end of the summer and still haven’t received anything.
“My analyst, it took me over a month to get in contact with her … in the first place,” she added. “We’re still waiting on quotes. Our damage report was wrong she says, so it took her over a month to get back to me, then when she does get back to me she says she noticed a mistake on my report, they didn’t include the price of the concrete or something, so it doubled our damage amount. We have to wait for her to get back to us with the new damage report before we can do anything.”
She added that getting a survey and engineer’s report done cost a considerable amount of money, and she only found out she had to get them after speaking with Gale and Perry. They will have to have a new foundation poured, but things won’t be started until the spring, at the earliest. She emails the MSP every other day trying to find answers.
“It’s horrible,” she said “We’re living in chaos. We can’t go ahead with anything, because she’s not getting back to me with any answers.”
