Go to Terrasse Vaudreuil, on the northwestern side of Ile Perrot, and it isn’t hard to find houses surrounded by water.
Between 1st Avenue and 10th Avenue in particular, water levels are inching up, currently 40 cm below the highest levels of 2017. But rain is in the forecast, snow is still melting, and there are other concerns.
“What worries us more is what’s up north — it’s a huge water basin that’s coming up the Ottawa River,” said Ron Kelley, Terrasse-Vaudreuil’s director general.
The municipality is a borough of Vaudreuil-Soulanges, and one local woman has already voluntarily left her home after water rushed into her basement.
“She was just at the point where she said, ‘I can’t fight it anymore,” Kelley said.
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Yet volunteers have created tens of thousands of sandbags, and many residents not only have sandbag walls guarding their homes, but multiple sump pumps running at the same time, buttressed by generators.
One point of concern is the Galipeault Bridge, the only direct link from Ile-Perrot to the Island of Montreal, which closed briefly in 2017 during the worst flooding. Officials don’t think it will flood this time around — current projections hold that water levels will rise slightly in the next 48 hours, and then recede again.
“But we take that with a grain of salt,” said Peter Schiefke, member of parliament for Vaudreuil-Soulange.
Warning residents not to let their guard down, Schiefke said, “Projections can change.”
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