Homeowners living along the Red River north of Winnipeg are nervously watching the waters as unprecedented fall ice jams threaten to push the river over its banks.
Jim Stinson, municipal emergency coordinator for the RM of St. Andrews, says as many as 30 homes would be at risk should the jams stop the river from flowing north to Lake Winnipeg.
It’s something the municipality has never had to deal with this time of year.
“We’ve never seen it, we have no precedents before — nobody can tell us what’s going to happen,” Stinson said Wednesday.
“I’ve talked to residents who’ve lived here 40 or 50 years and they have never seen the river this high — or this type of ice — in the fall time.”
Stinson said locals have been keeping an eye on the water since the start of November, but the ice really started to build on the river near Breezy Point and Selkirk after Remembrance Day.
“This is a pack ice — in other words, the ice has been flowing down and has been packing up,” he explained.
“If you get a jam, it gets solid and it forms a big peak and then it makes a dam right down to the bottom, and that stops the water from going and it flows over.
“If it does jam up, that could cause a lot of issues.”
Residents tell Global News the river is eight to nine feet higher than normal for this time of year, but far, Stinson said no homes have flooded.
He said the municipality has has roughly 3,000 filled sandbags on the ready, and another 50,000 empty sandbags available for homeowners.
There’s also three pumps working on River Road, where Stinson says water has already crossed over.
Local landowner Nick, who asked us not to use his last name, said his property is in danger of flooding.
“Absolutely unprecedented,” he said.
“The river, and the ice on the river, has never, ever been like this in the fall time. Never.”
“If this keeps going, and if the water levels get as high as the ice and start flowing over, all the people along here are going to be flooded,” he said. “Everybody.”
Stinson said he’s concerned about what this will mean for spring flooding.
“If we have this much water and this type of ice right now, when it breaks up in the springtime, we don’t know what it’s going to do,” he said.
“The province has been good, trying to give us as much information as they have, (but) even they don’t have that information.
“This is spring type stuff that we deal with, so it’s hard to say what this is going to do.”
–With files from Amber McGuckin