Millions in damages, months of cleanup ahead after flooding in Sussex, N.B.
Last week’s storm brought ‘largest flood that we’ve seen in decades,’ says Mayor Marc Thorne
An out-of-towner driving through Sussex last Friday “wouldn’t really know” that there had been a significant event, said Sussex CAO Scott Hatcher.
But residents hit after heavy rains Wednesday and Thursday overwhelmed the banks of Trout Creek and flooded many town streets, homes and businesses, will be dealing with the aftermath for up to a year, Hatcher said Friday.
“Everybody that has been impacted has several months ahead of them. We probably have upwards of a year trying to get this behind us,” he said, saying aerial photos of the peak flooding were “beyond comprehension.”
A rainstorm pounded Sussex with 96 millimetres of rain last week, with 79 millimetres on Feb. 28 and 17 millimetres on Feb. 29, both the highest recorded totals since 2016, according to Environment Canada. Thirty-six people from 27 households were evacuated, and flooding impacted many residential homes and subdivisions as well as closing “almost every street” in the town to traffic, Mayor Marc Thorne said Thursday.
Many of the town’s main roads were impassable for hours and people accessing the highway were being forced to “leave town and come around the highway and use other entrances.”
“This is the largest flood that we’ve seen in decades. This is slightly larger than what we saw in 2014 and that flood was a disaster. And this time, we’ve got even more water,” Thorne said.
In 2014, spring flooding led to 1,450 evacuations and destroyed 715 homes, mostly in Sussex or Sussex Corner, according to provincial records.
‘SERIOUS TROUBLE’
Thorne said town officials were keeping a watchful eye on water levels Wednesday due to the heavy rainfall with the creek’s level rising steadily throughout the day. He said weather forecasts had indicated there would three to five hours of respite in the rainfall intensity.
“We felt we might be able to dodge a bullet on this,” he said. “But that respite never came. It just kept on hammering, so we knew by suppertime ... that we were likely in some serious trouble.”
Damage was expected to include “many, many homes receiving ground water, if not surface water,” Thorne said.
“There’s a lot of homes located in the valley of the town within a few hundred metres of the creek that will receive elevated ground water because the whole valley is built on gravel.”
Thorne asked residents to know that town officials are doing their best and “we understand the toll this takes on people, emotionally. We feel it. We experience it ourselves. We live here and we’re going to do our best to make sure everybody comes through this whole.”
PROVINCIAL ASSISTANCE
Last Friday, the province opened its damage reporting line at 1-888-553-8558, or online through Service New Brunswick. The reporting is used to activate the disaster financial assistance program, and is open to residents, tenants, businesses and nonprofits, according to a press release.
Residents were also reminded to contact their insurance companies, keep receipts for repairs and replacement purchases and log hours spent cleaning their own or their family’s properties. The town put out 12 dumpsters on Friday for residents to aid in cleanup, and safety inspection teams were to go door to door in affected neighbourhoods to check damage to electrical and other systems, Hatcher said last Friday.
On Tuesday this week, Hatcher said they’ve been through five rounds of dumping related to the flood cleanup dumpsters, and it was likely to take another 10 days to subside.
Hatcher said that damage to municipal infrastructure is still being assessed, but beyond damage to shoulders and some potholes, there were no major washouts on the roads.
Hatcher said the 2014 flood caused $18 million in damage and the total this time should be “several times that.”
FLOOD MITIGATION
Public Safety Minister Kris Austin spoke Thursday at a press conference with Thorne saying flood mitigation “is important, there’s no question, and I’ve said it before, we can continue to pay out after the fact, or we can pay to help mitigate some the effects.”
Austin also spoke about partnering with the federal government on flood mitigation process assessing what lands are appropriate for development.
The town has proposed a flood mitigation plan that involves digging diversion channels to relieve the pressure on Trout Creek, submitted the plan last year for federal approval and it is under review, according to Hatcher.
“It’s a great application that shows needs and our solution,” Hatcher said, saying the $38-million proposal, which would be funded through all levels of government, offers a savings of 5.4 times the potential cost of damages. Hatcher said that dredging the river alone wouldn’t account for “extreme event flow,” so the water needs to be directed into the Kennebecasis River.
He said when the town researched the cost of doing nothing as part of their flood proposal, modelling suggested that the vulnerable area of town included 670 homes and the potential of $119 million in damage, $85 million of which would be residential.
“It’s predictable, that’s the frustrating part,” he said, saying that as the disaster financial assistance program, which is jointly funded by the provincial and federal governments, will get things back to status quo “but next week it could happen all over again.”
“Our future is on undertaking a project that mitigates flood damage,” he said.