apartment building

By Joel Goldenberg, Joel Ceausu and
Chelsey St-Pierre
The Suburban

Last week’s flood didn’t end with the rain. An owner of a 130-unit apartment building on Thimens in St. Laurent, across the street from the Raymond Bourque Arena, said her building’s garage was flooded with five feet of water. The area of the borough, including part of the Place Vertu parking lot, was flooded in scenes reminiscent of the July 14, 1987 disaster.

“We still don’t have any power back,” the owner told The Suburban Monday morning. “The water from the street emptied into our garage. There are 300 people in my building. Most of the apartments are double occupancy, [with seniors] and some families. The generators and the transformers were under water, everything was completely under water. The sewers in front of the garage were obviously blocked.”

The power finally came back Monday afternoon.

The owner has been calling the borough, and she hopes they install water retention basins in the area — a person from the arena said that has been under discussion, she said. She also says action is needed. Florida, which has intercoastal waterways and experiences many hurricanes, has water retention basins, she pointed out. She has also been calling Intact, her insurance company.

“I obviously made a claim on my insurance. Believe it or not, after calling them over and over again, they haven’t called me back. They’re extremely busy, they’re overloaded. My tenants are calling their insurance companies because their cars were flooded — we must have had 50 or 60 in the garage. Some cars were able to start and were taken out, and others were completely submerged.”

Terry Sousa was stuck at the south end of Décarie heading home after a four-day trip to the U.S. “I heard about the rain and figured I’d chance it once I crossed the border. It was a big mistake.” The Ahuntsic resident found himself with his wife and nine-year-old son “inching, I wouldn’t say inching, we were centimetering!” along as traffic was routed off Décarie north.

After 90-plus minutes he got off and tried to snake his way east towards l’Acadie to catch what he hoped would be an easier 15 north of the Met. “Another mistake. All around it was a mess. What should have taken 40 minutes max took three hours. I’m so glad I filled up on gas before I crossed the border. I felt so smart I was saving money, which I lost along with all that time. Imagine though if we were stranded bumper-to-bumper on a flooded Décarie and couldn’t move the car?” His home, an older duplex, was unaffected by the torrential rains, but his new garden “was toast. My tenant said they looked down and it was a pool of muck. That’s a big cleanup but I’m not complaining. I know some people got hit hard.”

Anna from downtown Montreal said the traffic congestion increased following the storm as main roads were blocked off intermittently until the weekend. “I just took a day off work, I used up one of my sick days because spending an extra hour on the road each way trying to get around means I have to rearrange pick up and drop off for my kid and it’s just not possible. Everyone else would be inconvenienced the same way. A lot of people have switched to working from home with the way traffic is already. The roads in Montreal are already a disaster for drivers and they say we should just bike everywhere. I am very athletic but for those of us who need to carpool with our families, we can’t just bike-pool especially while there is a pool in the middle of our road.” n