Every time I see floods on TV, my heart bleeds for the victims, because I know the ordeal that awaits them – I went through that during the famous “deluge” of July 14, 1987. It’s when the water recedes and the cameras leave that the hardest part begins.
This kind of event doesn’t happen once every ten years anymore, but every summer now.
In 1987, our small, very middle-class nuclear family had been settled for two weeks in a new rented apartment on Champlain Street in the Centre-Sud district – the same district that had just been flooded once again by a monstrous water main break. A large apartment, on the ground floor, with a basement and a huge yard. We were overjoyed. I was the only one with my own room in the basement, and I could finally read late into the night without being scolded – the future was full of promise for the teenager I was becoming, even if I still slept in my little girl’s pink four-poster bed, which I no longer liked, but which had cost my parents their ass, in a delirium of love.
And then the “historic” torrential rain came. We were located at the bottom of the hill, in a hollow, with a sewer right in front that ended up overflowing. The water was rising in the basement at a crazy speed, we could do nothing.
While my parents struggled in vain to contain the invasion, I went back and forth from the basement to the ground floor to save my books, my only obsession, as if I had guessed that everything was going to be swallowed up.
The back door window to the basement eventually broke, water rushed in and nearly drowned us, the basement filled up in seconds and we were knee-deep in water on the ground floor. Just about everything we owned was in the water (except my books piled on the kitchen table) and my little brother was screaming in fear.
PHOTO DENIS COURVILLE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Décarie Boulevard flooded following the torrential rains of July 14, 1987
I remember my father sitting on a chair in the middle of the mess, his eyes empty, his legs in the water, completely overwhelmed, while my mother called relatives crying. They arrived, dismayed and helpless in the face of the disaster, until two of them, a couple of friends, decided to take matters into their own hands. They took my parents in, while my brother went to sleep at our cousin’s and I, at my grandparents’.
For days, three pumps drained the water from the apartment. You could see that it wasn’t spring water by the extent of the mud and the damage. Total loss. The walls warped, the furniture all swollen, the paint peeling, etc. But we were tenants and not owners. What hurt the most was the loss of irreplaceable memories: photos, birthday cards, letters… We had almost no archives of our lives left. But, by some miracle, we found the two turtles and the goldfish alive, escaped from the aquarium, while the hamster and the dog were safe. We picked up the clothes soiled by the dirty water, took the furniture out into the yard to dry, in full view of everyone. This couple of friends who decided to help us didn’t slow down. Every curious person who showed up to enjoy the show left with a bag of laundry to wash and they had better say yes.
The city inspector arrived to analyze the damage and confirmed that we were among the unluckiest in the neighborhood. After spending days noting insignificant losses in garages and sheds, he suggested we put in more to get a respectable amount – he could see that we had nothing left. And the insurance companies were not paying for this “act of God.”
For months, while waiting for compensation and for the basement to be redone, I slept with my little brother in the same room, on mattresses on the floor. Everything was damp, it smelled of mold, he had repeated ear infections. My mother called her congressman every week to get his check. By Christmas, we still hadn’t received anything, and my father took the biggest brush of his life. We still laugh about it today when we look at the photos of that evening, of which he remembered nothing the next day.
I remember my mother’s tears when she received the $4,360 check from the government. That’s when we discovered the IKEA kingdom and I finally had my first real teenage bedroom. It took a deluge to drown the little girl’s last princess dreams with her pink canopy bed.
But for the rest of the year, every time it rained, we completely panicked, so much so that we moved again, unable to bear the stress. As tenants, we could still, at that time, run away, even though climate change was not even being discussed. We never lived on the ground floor again, that is one of the lessons learned from this ordeal. Along with the importance of friendship, mutual aid and love, in these hard times that bind us together.
Good luck to all the victims of the disaster in Quebec. Sincerely.