Hundreds of hungry and cold Edmontonians lined up to get a hot meal for the Thanksgiving holiday Sunday – though an emergency made the annual dinner a challenging event to pull off.
On Thursday morning, construction workers digging up the road in front of Boyle Street Community Centre struck a water main.
As water poured out of the broken pipe, it started to flood the building’s basement, forcing the evacuation of the building.
READ MORE: Flooding causes evacuation, shutdown of Edmonton’s Boyle Street agency
In short order, staff needed to find a new location for Boyle Street’s annual Thanksgiving dinner. Less fortunate residents of Edmonton have come to rely upon the event – which provides them with a free meal – over the years.
Event organizers decided to plan to serve the meal at their plaza building – a few blocks east – and went to work getting it ready to host hundreds of people.
“We’ll make it work for our community and hopefully they won’t be too impacted by it – they will get that meal that they need,” Ian Mathieson, Boyle Street’s director of operations, said.
NAIT culinary students, including Steve Vereschagin, were hard at work making the food over the last week.
“We prepared 65 turkeys, 100 litres of gravy, 100 litres of dressing and 100 pounds of turnips,” he said.
It was gobbled up quickly.
“It was excellent,” Hazel Proulx said. “It was the best meal you could ever have for Thanksgiving.”
Another dinner guest, Marc, said food wasn’t the only thing he was thankful for at the dinner.
“It’s a way of connecting with people I might not have seen in many, many years. Just a sense of community.”
Volunteers, like Bill Buckham with the Edmonton West Rotary Club, gave up their holiday to help others.
“It’s satisfying to see the delight. The people here are really, really polite. When they say, ‘Thank you, happy Thanksgiving,’ they really mean it. It’s a payment you can’t buy.”
Their generosity didn’t go unnoticed.
“It’s very lucky to have them making the food, if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have anything,” Proulx said.
“It came together really nicely,” Boyle Street staff member Ashley Strand said. “I wasn’t expecting so many people. Especially with the snow and the change of location. But it’s still going. We’ve been serving now for about two hours and the line is still strong.”
Volunteers were expecting about 550 people to come through the doors but it seemed even more showed up, meaning the food ran short.
“I don’t think we’re going to have enough,” Vereschagin said.
“It happens every year and it’s devastating because everyone deserves a Thanksgiving meal,” Strand said.
But the new venue at Boyle Street Plaza turned out to be a hit with the guests.
“It seems like the community really likes it. It seems to have good traffic flow and nobody is outside, lined up.”
It’s something the organizers said they will consider for next Thanksgiving.