Mounting flood costs in tens of millions of dollars, provincial official says during tour of Interlake

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This article was published 02/06/2022 (1402 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GIMLI — Groundwater bubbles up near the top of a small hole in Del Ritchie’s yard. The soil is soaked in the spot his mother had reserved for a new lilac bush. No planting will be possible in the near future.

Ritchie’s Winnipeg Beach property backs onto Boundary Creek, which was “rushing like crazy” just a couple of weeks ago, despite crews severing the roadway above to prevent nearby homes from being flooded. If the road hadn’t been cut, the rising water would’ve had nowhere to go.

“Guaranteed, the way the creek meanders, it would have taken out those two places,” he said, pointing to neighbouring cottages on the southwest corner of Lake Winnipeg. His home would have been “definitely impacted. The foundation and the rest — when you get water, you can’t have it sitting for days.”

In the past 10 years, he’s never seen the water rush this high and is concerned about flood damage. “Of course. Well, inevitably, someone’s going to be buggered,” he said, adding: “They can’t keep ripping the road up, man.”

The provincial government is to build a permanent bridge along Prospect Street, over the creek — one of several short- and long-term infrastructure projects planned to protect communities from flood damage, Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Doyle Piwniuk announced Thursday.

This year’s flood season has already cost Manitoba tens of millions of dollars and damage estimates won’t be finalized for some time.

“It’s very early days for us to put a number on it,” Infrastructure deputy minister Sarah Thiele said Thursday morning, as she, Piwniuk and Agriculture Minister Derek Johnson (MLA for Gimli) went on a tour of flooded areas and washed-out roads near Gimli.

Part of the officials’ tour involved conducting assessments in areas along Lake Winnipeg. Piwniuk said they plan to do another assessment in flooded areas in western Manitoba.

Andrea Towers’s family has owned a cottage at Winnipeg Beach since the late 1960s. The property is across from a provincial marina she says has created bottlenecks in the water flow along Boundary Creek, which flows into Lake Winnipeg.

“This has happened before, and it will happen again,” she said of the high water levels.

Towers said she thinks existing measures have been sufficient to protect her family’s property but a permanent bridge over the creek “would be great.”

Almost 2,000 municipal sites have been damaged by flooding this year, and the list of damaged provincial infrastructure is growing, Thiele said. “We’re still assessing and we still have areas that are under water that we can’t look at yet, so it will be a significant recovery program.”

Repairing the damage will be done on a prioritized basis, as well as in areas where the province preventatively cut back culverts to allow water flow due to high levels. Areas with preventative cuts, including the one on Provincial Road 222, where the tour members spoke to reporters, will likely be repaired later this summer.

The province has plans for more infrastructure, including new bridges and dams, but it will take years to complete, officials acknowledged.

Piwniuk said the provincial government plans to spend $1.5 billion over the next three years on repairs that include rebuilding highways to bear heavier loads and maintain proper culverts.

Piwniuk said flooding has had a significant economic impact on businesses.

“We’re having a crisis right now. But now we can learn from all these floods that we’ve had and now we have an opportunity to look at the infrastructure that we need to invest in, much like we did in the Red River Valley,” he said. “We saw that in this last flood, compared to 1997 or 2009, our infrastructure really saved a lot of properties.”

Johnson said he expects the impact on the agriculture industry to be somewhere between $24 million and $36 million in excess-moisture insurance claims. After the 2011 flood, Manitoba received $162 million in flood-related insurance claims, the minister said.

A tour of Peguis First Nation, which has experienced severe flooding this season, was not part of Thursday’s tour, but Piwniuk said there are plans for a visit. He said the province is working with the federal government to help flooded First Nations communities.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca