A Headingley woman says her home is completely surrounded by ice after a devastating basement flood caused by the weekend storm.
“We look like we’re living in the middle of an ice rink,” Sally Mann told 680 CJOB’s The Start.
“It’s just flooded fields and flooded roads, and overnight it’s just turned to ice, so goodness knows what’s going to happen today.
“I’m very tired. It’s heartbreaking. It’s absolutely awful and so many of us are affected by it. It’s crazy.”
Mann said she initially didn’t take the storm very seriously, because she’s experienced heavy snow before and it has never been a problem.
This time, it seemed like a small amount of water was coming into the furnace room and a workspace in the basement — until the water started coming in fast and furious.
“The toilet started backing up downstairs and the bath filled up with sewage, so at this stage, we were beginning to panic a little bit more,” she said.
“For a couple of hours, it was a fine line between where we pumped out water, and then it got to the stage where it just came in such fast quantity, we couldn’t do anything with it.
“The sump got so overwhelmed with water, it couldn’t drain.”
Despite the as-of-yet-unknown level of damage — and in a basement that was already overhauled just months ago due to an unrelated flooding issue — Mann said she feels lucky compared to some.
“Our next-door neighbours, apparently their basement was completely full of sewage,” she said.
“Their yard is right up to their front door. It’s like a lake all around them. … Compared to a lot, I think we’ve come off fairly lucky. We only had five inches.”
As cleanup continues, Mann said she and her husband are waiting for the inevitable next stage of flooding.
“We’ve got six-foot snow drifts all the way around the house, so when that melts, I just don’t know where it’s going to go. We’re probably going to have a few more days or weeks of water coming in.”
Flooded roads, flooded basements and flooded fields are, unfortunately, the order of the day in southern Manitoba.
Heavy snow and rain over the weekend caused misery provincewide, from mass power outages in the west, to torn up streets and flooded homes in Winnipeg.
Winnipeg saw between 50 and 70 millimetres of rain and three centimetres of snow.
The precipitation means a bad pothole season has become much worse, and adding to the challenges of the daily commute are some flooded streets around the city, including Route 90 north of Dublin and Henderson Highway at the Perimeter underpass.
According to Manitoba Hydro, about 13,000 homes and businesses in the province, mostly in the Dauphin area and the southwest portion of the province, were without power Monday morning.
Hydro says it will be replacing dozens if not hundreds of broken poles, and some of the outages could last another day, if not longer, as difficult weather has increased the challenge for crews trying to access trouble spots.