Published August 15, 2024

BRENDA O’FARRELL
The 1510 West

“What do I do?”

That was the single, simple question one Pierrefonds homeowner posed to a home-renovation expert Saturday morning on a popular radio phone-in show, explaining she had eight inches of water in her basement, and was at a loss as to how to deal with the disaster.

The homeowner has lived in her house for the past 38 years and never had any flooding issues. But that, of course, was before last Friday’s devastating storm, the remnants of Hurricane Debby that swept through the Montreal region dumping a record-setting amount of rain in just a few hours.

She spoke for a lot of West Islanders last weekend. Although there are no official statistics, The 1510 West interviewed several West Island mayors in the last few days, each estimating the number of homes damaged by flood and sewer water in each of their towns to be in the hundreds. Perhaps the hardest hit was Île Bizard, where borough Mayor Doug Hurley estimated about 1,200 homes in his town had been swamped.

“Streets had a foot-and-a-half, two feet, in some cases five feet (of water) in the middle of the road,” Hurley said on Monday. “Imagine what it was like in the houses.”

Navigating the streets in the north end of Ste. Anne de Bellevue was best done by kayak on Friday evening.

Some homes, Hurley said, had up to seven feet of water in their basements, extending the damage to the ground floor.

In all, according to Environment Canada, 157 millimetres of rain had fallen at Dorval airport last Friday, surpassing the previous record of 93.5 mm set in November of 1996, while a whopping 173 millimetres of rain was recorded in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, which not only set a new record, but ranked as the second-highest deluge recorded in the province during last Friday’s storm. The most intense rainfall in the province was recorded in the town of Lanoraie in the Lanaudière region, north of Montreal, where 221 mm of rain overwhelmed the tiny municipality of less than 5,000 residents.

“We used to be ready for some flooding, but this was – never did we expect this,” said Ste. Anne de Bellevue Mayor Paola Hawa in an interview Sunday.

“What’s scary about this is that we know it’s going to happen again. We don’t know when, but it’s going to happen again,” Hawa added. “This is not going to stop.”

Hawa was not spared from the hardship, explaining the basement of her home was flooded.

The north end of Ste. Anne was the most affected by the cascades of rain, she said, with some residents pulling out their kayaks to navigate the streets on Friday evening.

In Beaconsfield, few residents on Elm Street were spared damage as the flood waters rose, said Mayor Georges Bourelle.

“In 37 years, I’ve been living here, my sump pump has never gone on,” Bourelle said, explaining that his house was not spared either.

He could not say how many homes in Beaconsfield were affected, but said some suffered from sewage backup into basements, while others were inundated with runoff water. Damage was also suffered at Centennial Centre and the Beaconsfield Recreation Centre.

In Pointe Claire, homes throughout the municipality were impacted, with the areas around Westcliffe and Alstonvale particularly hard hit, said Mayor Tim Thomas.

The basement of Pointe Claire city hall took in water, with Thomas saying Monday that temporary space for the municipality’s archives and IT services will have to be found.

As the cleanup is ongoing, with homeowners removing soggy furniture, carpets and other household items, most West Island towns will be providing extra curbside garbage pickups this week and next to clear away debris and construction material.

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