‘Just a pile of rubbish there now’
Damage becoming clear amid historic New Brunswick ood
For 48 years, Jerry Mcfarland’s rustic cottage on New Brunswick’s Grand Lake was a cherished refuge for family and friends, where precious summertime memories were carefully recorded in a series of well-worn journals.
Today, Mcfarland’s cottage is in ruins, shoved o its foundation and torn apart on the weekend by rising oodwaters.
“It was a million-dollar property, to me,” the 84-year-old Fredericton resident said Monday. “It’s just a pile of rubbish there now ... with the thrashing of the water.”
With the ooding in central New Brunswick nally stabilizing after reaching record levels on the weekend, the extent of damage caused in areas cut o by rising water is starting to become clear.
Mcfarland’s cottage was one of many on Grand Lake that were swept away on Saturday as powerful winds pushed the rising water to places it had never reached before.
“On Saturday the wind was wild,” he said. “It was really the wind that blew the waves ... e waves this time were much greater than ever before. It was the wind that really knocked down the cottages.”
Pictures recently posted on social media show cottages, trailers and other recreational vehicles oating away.
Mcfarland, a retired university lecturer and school district supervisor with four grown children, said his cottage had survived previous oods that reached historic levels in 1973 and 2008. And it was in 2008 that he decided to raise the one-storey building by 18 inches, using concrete blocks.
“I was sure that I would never get ooded,” said Mcfarland, whose son Mark also lost his cottage to the ooding. “But nothing like this has been recorded before in our history.”
Localized ooding is practically an annual event in this part of central New Brunswick. In late April and early May, heavy rains combine with the melting snow pack in northern New Brunswick to engorge the mighty Saint John River and its tributaries, which comprise a vast basin along the west side of the province.
Grand Lake, a 45-minute drive east of Fredericton, is the province’s largest lake at 20 kilometres long and ve kilometres wide. It drains through the Jemseg River into the Saint John River east of Gagetown.
Mcfarland said he and his family will miss the cottage, but he’s thankful no one was hurt.
Rebuilding is not an option, given the expense, he said. However, Mcfarland has his eye on a used motorhome that he might park on his lakeside property.
To be sure, the loss of the cottage journals will be keenly felt by his entire family, he said.
“Those are the memories we had from every day, and those are gone,” he said, noting that his late father wrote the rst entry in 1970. “It’s an emotional thing as well as a tactile thing ... I hope that they might possibly be around, but I doubt it.”
Mcfarland said the cottage was insured, though he’s sure the policy doesn’t o er coverage for ooding.
Meanwhile, provincial o cials say ood waters are expected to begin stabilizing father south in the Saint John area.
Levels were expected to peak Monday in hard-hit Saint John, N.B., but officials warned flood conditions would persist for the “foreseeable future.”
Greg Maccallum, director of the province’s Emergency Measures Organization, said residents should remain vigilant.
“When we talk about the water going down, that is not a trigger for people to go home necessarily,” said Maccallum at a media briefing Monday afternoon.
“A very deliberate process has to be followed to make sure it’s safe for them to go home... In some cases, it may be a matter of days after the water levels are below ood stage, in some cases, it will be weeks.”
Maccallum said recovery teams are being put together, and he declared the clean-up will be a “dif cult phase.”
“It’s a phase of discovery based on inspection, based on a lot of considerations about what is safe to be done and what needs to be done to return to normalcy,” said Maccallum.
“ is is a period of time when people do need to be patient. ey need to understand that it is as deliberate an operation to go back as it is to get out.”
More than 1,150 people have registered with the Red Cross to say they have evacuated their homes, while many others have left to stay with family or friends without registering.