Pierrefonds flood victims told to leave airport hotel
Seven months after her home in Pierrefonds was flooded, Frances Maxant is still living in a hotel with her husband and four boys, waiting for her basement to be rebuilt.
It’s far from ideal, she says, but she’s made the best of it — getting the kids onto local hockey teams so they have something to do after school besides hanging around in the lobby, and stocking the fridge in the kitchenette, so they don’t always have to eat in restaurants.
But even that little bit of normalcy will soon disappear, as Maxant and her family are being forced to leave the hotel, the Residence Inn Montreal Airport, by Thursday.
“The boys are very distraught. They can’t understand why we’re being kicked out, and neither can I,” Maxant said Tuesday night. “It’s outrageous! The Red Cross has forked over between $40,000 and $50,000 to them and after all that money they kick you out for no apparent reason?”
Officially, Maxant, among about 20 flood victim families living at the Marriott hotel, was told there was some sort of “confusion” — the Red Cross told them she wanted to leave so they gave her two rooms to another family.
But Maxant, overwhelmed by her circumstances, trying to get four boys, aged seven to 14, to four different schools every day, says she never wanted to leave.
She believes that a couple of minor incidents turned the hotel management against her. One incident involved Maxant asking the front desk to alert her if her boys were on the computers in the lobby. They didn’t want to babysit, they apparently told their supervisors.
Another grew out of one of the hotel’s regular “evening socials,” where free food was provided to guests, but staff objected to Maxant’s family of six taking seven hamburgers.
“She said leave some for the guests — as if we weren’t guests,” Maxant said. “There have been a few little things that happened here and there but I always thought I was treated like I was second-class.”
The hotel management would not comment on why they were asking Maxant to leave.
“I’m sorry but I don’t have any information to give you,” assistant general manager Ana Oliveira told the Montreal Gazette. “Our dealings are with the Red Cross.”
The Red Cross, in turn, was circumspect.
“The Red Cross will continue to provide Ms. Maxant and her family with emergency housing support, provided according to criteria set by and financial support from the ministry of public security.”
Maxant has been given the option of either Ruby Foo’s Hotel on Décarie Blvd. — where she says the rooms are smaller and there is no kitchenette — or the Quality Inn in Pointe-Claire, well off the route of hockey coaches willing to drive the boys to practices and games, when Maxant can’t be there herself.
“Do you think a coach will drop them off all the way in Pointe-Claire?” Maxant asks. “The boys are afraid they ’ll lose their hockey.”
As for returning home to 5th Ave. N. in Pierrefonds, Maxant says that’s still a ways off. She needs a new furnace, and to have the basement rebuilt. She has to get back to the public security ministry to see about finally getting the money to do it. She just hasn’t had the time.