Floods after torrential rains | ‘I lost everything in 45 minutes’

(Saint-Lin–Laurentides) Between the collapsing roads and the families who have lost everything, the echoes of last Friday’s torrential rains continue to resonate in Saint-Lin–Laurentides, where citizens denounce the city’s laxity in preventing damage during the storms.

People will remember last Friday’s deluge for a long time. Jérôme Fournier and his partner Élodie even more so. “This was my haven of peace. I lost everything in 45 minutes,” she explains in a shaky voice as she looks at her once-pretty bungalow, which has become uninhabitable. She juggles anxiety and despair as her house seems to be holding together by magic. “I have nothing left. I don’t have a cent left. I don’t even have soap to wash myself,” she continues as she adjusts for the umpteenth time a large bandage covering a wound on her forehead.

Towels and sandbags proved useless that fateful night. Within an hour, her basement had filled with a foot and a half of water. The concrete foundation collapsed around 9 p.m. One disaster followed another: the man-made lake overflowed and the road in front of her house caved in.

The small family gathered for a karaoke evening had to leave the house urgently.

“We got out, grabbing what we could. If we had been lying down, forget it. We would have been buried dead,” emphasizes Jérôme Fournier.

In the chaos, Élodie had a violent fall while saving one of her two cats from the rubble. She fell as the house was tilting. She came out in pain and misery with her cat scratching her face and a serious head injury. She needed stitches. The ambulance took forever to arrive on the scene because of the many closed roads, she recalls.

She finally got treatment in the early morning in a private clinic after an interminable wait in the emergency room of two hospitals. “I was pissing blood and people were making jokes in triage, looking at me nonchalantly. It just kept getting worse,” Élodie complains.

Major aftereffects, little help

After the nightmare, the paperwork. Supported by her partner, she has to run left and right to get help from her insurer, from whom she has no news.

“It seems that I am not the priority. But look at my house, it almost collapsed!”, sums up the disaster victim, her eyes glued to her phone in the hope of a call from her insurer.

The Red Cross did not relocate her, as she now lives with her partner, who still has a residence a few houses away. She was provided with $400 to buy new clothing, food and other necessities.

“The Red Cross girl was almost embarrassed to give me just that. You’ve lost your memories and your whole life and they give you a gift card and say, ‘Here, go buy yourself some clothes.’” She says it without embarrassment: she is far from being a millionaire. Not to mention the thousand and one torments caused by the event: insomnia, loss of appetite, major anxiety, fatigue and apprehension in the face of another heavy rain.

Risk area

“The problem is not new,” sobs Martine, Élodie’s neighbor. Her new car, her house renovated with all her RRSPs, her peaceful retirement on the edge of a small lake in the middle of nature: her happiness slipped through her fingers in one evening.

She and her partner were evacuated by the Red Cross and taken to a hotel. Their eyes filled with tears as they looked back at the extent of the damage. The balcony was gone and their vehicle was partially buried. Neighbors moved to tears came to hug them.

Every time it rains, there are problems, Martine continues. Her communications with the municipality are frequent. “Oh, they know me. I’ve been pestering the city for five years. I even went to the city council last December to say that we had to do something,” she explains.

Faced with the status quo, her partner and Élodie’s partner built a low wall some time ago as a precaution. It wasn’t enough in the face of last week’s heavy rainfall. “We paid for it out of our own pockets,” says Jérôme Fournier. “The city should have done something,” adds Élodie.

Each time, the residents of the neighborhood are offered sandbags. But what Martine would have liked were real prevention mechanisms that would have reduced the consequences of Friday’s bad weather. “I am aware that there would still have been some damage. But my house destroyed because of a collapsed road…”

“A tragedy without a name”

A few blocks away, another gaping hole in the middle of the street prevents residents from moving around. The road workers are busy, under the watchful eye of Marco Gallant.

The resident has a lot to say about the inaction of elected officials and the administration. “They all know who I am, so much so that I have been telling them for a long time that something must be done. It has gotten to the point where they are afraid that I will come to the city council,” he says in one breath.

He has been hammering home the message for seven years: we need to partially drain Lac Charbonneau and build adequate infrastructure to avoid the worst. Even if it means preventing construction in certain areas. “There would have been some damage, but not like this. People continued to take land. This garage, for example, every time it rains, it’s in the water,” he says, pointing to a shed destroyed by the flood. “It should have been destroyed.”

Citizens who raise the “elephant in the room” never get concrete answers, Gallant complains. “Everything is always put off until later,” he sighs.

“People are living through an unspeakable tragedy,” says Mathieu Maisonneuve, mayor of Saint-Lin–Laurentides since November 2021, questioned by The PressHe refrains from commenting on the maintenance of the premises and how they were designed.

It’s hard to imagine that any planning could have prevented 160 millimetres of rain from causing damage, he recalls.

But year after year, there are overflows. “We try to manipulate the dams that we control.” This week, he continues, the municipality’s public works engineer asked that Lake Charbonneau be completely emptied as a precaution. “It’s the lake where there are the most houses around.”

“I don’t want to blame people, but a lot of things were built without thinking about the consequences,” says Mathieu Maisonneuve.

The administration will try to take care of the seven dams north of the city. “This is an issue we have been working on since I started. With the rapid growth in Saint-Lin–Laurentides in recent years, we have a lot of work on our plate,” says the mayor.