Days later, large parts of Teulon, Man. are still under water after a severe thunderstorm flooded the city.
Brooke Allison, who lives in Teulon, said her property was flooded for several hours.
“Woke up at 6:30 and in the middle [of the backyard]it started to get a puddle and then I came home around noon and it was like that, so it wasn’t very long at all,” she recalls.
Water has since started receding on Allison’s property, but she still doesn’t have septic service running.
Anna Pazdzierski, the town’s mayor, estimated that about 75 percent of the homes in Teulon were damaged by the floods.
“It was coming so fast that nothing was keeping it up. People with two pumps running couldn’t keep the water out of their basements,” Pazjerski said.
It’s a problem that longtime Teulon resident and former mayor Ted Hodgkinson says could have been reduced if the township had worked to slow the flow of the provincial drainage channel that runs through town.
“A state of emergency should have been declared,” Hodgkinson said. “Then we could deal with restricting the flow of water to the city without having to run around seeking permission from all levels of government.”
Wes Taplin, Rockwood’s RM superintendent, said flood infrastructure is still damaged from the spring flood.
He says the huge amount of rain in such a short time is why the damage is so extensive.
While the RM is currently busy helping residents with the cleanup – Taplin said the RM will look into how to prevent an event like this in the future.
“We are in contact with the province and the city of Teulon itself to formulate a plan for this once the water stops receding so that we can do some mitigation to prevent it from happening again,” he said.
A potential plan drenched residents like Alison would appreciate.
“People have been saying for the last 20-30 years that they’ve lived here that they’ve never seen anything like this, so hopefully this will put some kind of plan in place if it ever happens again.”
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