Some residents in the RM of Morris were caught off guard Friday with strong winds gusting up to about 80 km/h, creating dangerous road conditions in some areas due to the worsening flood situation.
Winds gusting out of the south were hitting Provincial Road 205 head on. Waves were crashing over sections of the road, pushing debris up on and over.
A stretch of the highway between Provincial Trunk Highway 75 and PR 330 was closed to public traffic as of Friday afternoon.
A nearby resident who’s lived in the area for most of his life said the conditions changed quickly since Thursday.
“The wind like this, we haven’t experienced … this during the flood time, so this can make for some pretty scary conditions,” said Harley Siemens, an egg farmer who resides outside the ring dike on the south end of Rosenort.
“If anybody’s boating out there or even trying to get through the water, it’s very scary.”
About 10 to 12 inches flooded the road into his farm on Thursday, but the water rose another 10 inches by Friday morning, he said.
“We were at the farm this morning, and we saw the high winds were coming, so we kind of made the decision that us — me and my dad and our workers — we would leave the farm to come back inside the dike where it’s a little more safe,” Siemens said.
Siemens and his wife had been staying with his parents in Rosenort since they evacuated last week, he said.
He’d been travelling back every day to manage the farm, but Friday it became too dangerous.
“This does impact our business a bit. We have to plan ahead of time,” Siemens said.
“When we built our new facility, we kind of planned for this because we knew we were in a flood zone, so we got extra bins for extra storage, so we had about a month’s worth of storage feed for our hens.”
Siemens said he wouldn’t be driving back anytime Friday. The community is banding together, with lots of people offering to help, he said.
But ultimately, Siemens said they would have to wait for the water and wind to settle down.
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