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.
“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.
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.