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Quebec floods: Floodwaters keeping many Île-Bizard residents from going home

Click to play video: 'Quebec floods: Île-Bizard residents start to take stock of damage'
Quebec floods: Île-Bizard residents start to take stock of damage
WATCH: On Wednesday, some residents of flood-stricken Île-Bizard were temporarily allowed to return home and take stock of the damage. As Tim Sargent reports, many residents who were forced to leave, still don’t know when they’ll be able to come back for good – May 10, 2017

Flood waters continue to recede in greater Montreal but it’s still too early for homeowners to start celebrating.
Hundreds remain forced from their houses and they don’t know when they can return.
150 homes in Île-Bizard alone have been evacuated.
Many of them are on Roger Street.
The road lined with mobile homes is flooded with water ranging between a few inches to a few feet deep.
None of the 93 homes have running drinking water nor sewage facilities.

The underground infrastructure system has been ruined.

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“All the wood that was floating on the river went inside, not inside, but under the house. So it’s a big mess,” Louiselle Lamontagne, a homeowner on Roger Street told Global News.

No one expected city officials or anyone else to have stopped the Rivière des Prairies from flooding its banks.

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But like many other flooded victims, people living here complain that city officials were slow to react.

“We see the army today but when we were asking to get out of the house, there was no help for that,” Lamontagne said.

Most homeowners don’t have flood insurance. They will have to rely on the government assistance program to help pay for water damage.

“A lot of these people are in flooding zones and the insurance won’t cover,” borough Mayor Normand Marinacci told Global News.

And when the waters do recede, the hard labour of cleaning up will begin.

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