With rain forecast for this weekend, residents in flood-prone areas around Montreal remain on high alert as they continue to prepare for the worst.
“It’s a little bit scary,” said Pierrefonds-Roxboro resident Mohamed Lamine, who lives just metres away from the Rivière des Prairies and remembers how his house flooded in 2019.
Residents in the West Island borough learned during the flood that year, as well as another in 2017, that they need each other, and that is why the borough is once again relying on an army of volunteers to prepare.
So far they’ve mainly helped build dikes with sandbags.
“We had 64 addresses where we delivered sandbags,” explained city councillor Benoit Langevin. Bags are going “mainly elders, mainly people who weren’t able to lift 60 bags of 66 pounds,” he said.
That effort continued Saturday with about 30 volunteers building dikes to protect vulnerable homes near the waterfront.
But the people donating their time point out that they do more than that.
“We help residents in any way we can, even just providing somebody to talk to or whatever they need at the moment,” said resident Cameron Stoute, who also volunteered during the 2017 and 2019 floods.
He added that the group also helps reassure people living in the area.
City officials say that they are ready for any eventuality and that even if things don’t go as badly as they did during the last two big floods, people shouldn’t let their guard down.
“There are so many factors that come into play,” Langevin said, adding these include “rain or a lot of snow melt in another area that produces a lot of water.”
He’s urging people to keep flood installations in place, at least until mid-May, just to be on the safe side.
The borough will also continue to build a pool of volunteers, just in case things get worse.
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