Vaudreuil residents defer to Mother Nature
Citizens quick to praise the work of city workers, volunteers who helped out
After weeks of anxious waiting, the water finally breached early this week, pouring into the ground floor of the attractive lakefront home on the shores of Lac des Deux Montagnes in TerrasseVaudreuil that Herbert Stohl has owned for 27 years.
He joined the club of many in the community of about 2,000 off the western tip of Montreal whose houses sit like forlorn islands in a mud-brown sea, but he counts himself as lucky.
Nearly two decades ago when he started building an extension to his property, inspectors with the government of Quebec told him he had to place it at least at the level of what was considered safe for a once-in-a-hundred-years flood. He spent years building it himself, handling all the heavy wood panelling, ornately designed tile floors with steel inlay and the solid chimney of rough-cut stone. He set the whole structure on an eight-foot concrete foundation, all of it four inches above the height the experts recommended, just to be safe.
When the water poured in on Sunday, it came up an inch or two into the ground level of his home’s original structure. He’ll have to change the carpet in the master bedroom and probably the wood floors in the kitchen and the hallways and plenty of Gyproc. But the water stayed three inches below his 500-square-foot extension, sparing his crown jewel.
On Thursday afternoon, waiting for the electrician to come so Hydro-Québec could turn the power back on, he was taking the damages in stride.
“I can fix all that — it just takes time,” said Stohl, who retired long ago. His basement is a crawlspace, so there’s no damage there.
“That’s why I bought this house,” he said, noting that the whole area is considered a flood zone. “You’re not going to tell Mother Nature what to do. Otherwise Mother Nature is going to knock you around a bit.”
On the shores of TerrasseVaudreuil and slightly west in Vaudreuil-Dorion, there was ample evidence of nature’s force Thursday, with the waters of Lac des Deux Montagnes breaching its banks and flowing over shoreline streets like St-Charles Ave. and des Chenaux Rd., still closed to traffic in several areas because the water was several feet deep. Conditions in Terrasse-Vaudreuil were so bad, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed up Sunday to help out.
On des Chenaux, city workers built a wall of loose stone three feet high to stop the wind-borne waves from pushing water up residents’ lawns and into their basements.
Many citizens praised the work of city workers, administrators, firefighters and numerous volunteers who were quick to lend aid (One St-Charles resident said firefighters checked in so often he was addressing them with “You again?” when they came to the door). Volunteers in their own pickup trucks dropped off sandbags on des Chenaux, and were advised not to turn off their engines so the water couldn’t run into the tailpipe and stop the engine. Local restaurants provided free food for the volunteers.
On St-Charles, the offices of Club Voyages Tourbec and the Cafexo café boast some of the nicest lakefront vistas in town. Both were closed Thursday, their parking lots now one with the lake. At the travel agency, a pump kicked in every minute or so to expel water from the basement, but director Nancy Daoust said they were lucky — the pumps kept the water levels under a foot high. For the last week, her employees have been working from home, their Valleyfield office, or even the local Tim Hortons. The agency’s losses haven’t been severe, she said.
On the town’s website, good news. Water levels had dropped by 8.5 centimetres on Wednesday, and were expected to drop another 10 by Friday. But residents were advised to keep their sand bags in place. Rain is expected this weekend.