Water will stay at this level then slowly drop: city
But river is expected to remain high for days to come, according to official
Quebec’s once-in-a-century flood appeared to reach its worst on Sunday, but it will be many days before the cresting river levels subside, Quebec’s civil protection agency says.
The prognosis for the Montreal region is for river levels to stabilize on Monday and Tuesday, Gilles Desgagnés, regional director for Montreal, Laval, Lanaudière and the Laurentians said on Sunday evening after watching the des Prairies River along the northern edge of Montreal Island rise by 13 to 15 centimetres over the course of the day and inundate new areas that had thus far been spared, including Ahuntsic Cartierville borough.
“We can say we have reached the peak,” Desgagnés said, adding that the rise in water levels had already begun to slow by late Sunday. His agency is part of Quebec’s publicsafety department.
“It should stabilize on Monday and Tuesday and then it will begin to drop. But it will be very slow. It could take several days, a week or more, for the levels to drop.”
The forecast for the next several days, which calls for rain and windy conditions in the Montreal and Laval area, will factor into whether flooding revisits some areas or even advances into new areas if there’s strong wind, he said.
Desgagnés called the situation in Quebec “historic” and said the flooding that has punished several parts of the province, including areas of Montreal, is a once-in-a century event.
“We call it a 100-year flood,” he said, adding that it penetrated buildings that had not in living memory ever been flooded.
“It happens once every 100 years.”
On Montreal Island, the rising des Prairies River caused flooding on several streets in Ahuntsic Cartierville on Sunday, leading to the evacuation of 17 residents of 20 homes, Desgagnés said.
Besides Ahuntsic-Cartierville, the toll of homes flooded on Montreal Island stood, as of late Sunday, at more than 100 in Pierrefonds-Roxboro borough, about 100 in Île-Bizard– Ste- Geneviève borough, about 60 in the suburb of Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, two in the suburb of Senneville and an as-yet undetermined number in Beaconsfield and Montreal North, he said.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre declared a 48-hour state of emergency at 1 p.m. on Sunday when an earlier forecast called for the des Prairies River to rise by 20 centimetres by Monday night.
The state of emergency gives Montreal fire department director Bruno Lachance, whose department serves the city and the island suburbs, the power to force evacuations anywhere on the island if lives are at risk.
Coderre said the agglomeration council, which includes Montreal and the island suburbs, will be convened for a special meeting on Tuesday to decide whether to extend the state of emergency by an additional five days.
The mayor said that municipal authorities are in “observation mode” and not projecting ahead to cleanup plans. But that time will come, he added.
“(The water) will go down, but after that we also have to help people,” Coderre said. Among other needs, people will require temporary places to stay and some people will require counselling, he said.
Meanwhile, Hydro-Québec is working to retain as much water as possible in its reservoirs on the Outaouais and Saint-Maurice Rivers to ease the flow toward places like Montreal, Hydro- Québec spokesperson Louis-Olivier Batty said.
Workers had lowered the water level in those reservoirs at the beginning of April in anticipation of the annual spring snow melt.
The reservoirs are holding back 24 to 40 per cent of the water that would otherwise head into other rivers, he said.
“We’re doing as much as we can on our side to retain as much water as possible in our dams,” Batty said.
“Our hope is to help as many people as possible (by) reducing the water levels.”