More than a week has passed since heavy rainfall wreaked havoc on parts of Montreal’s West Island, with some residents still cleaning up the mess left behind by the waters.
Kulwant Sandhu, who lives in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, still does not have working lights in his basement, which was flooded in three feet of water.
“It’s very bad. It’s hard to explain. It’s very bad,” Sandhu told CityNews.
Sandhu, who was home from work when the basement started filling with water, says it happened very quickly.
“The water was coming from the garage and going down to the basement. We then started picking everything,” he said.
Sandhu is one of many DDO residents who saw their homes flooded.
According to Alex Bottausci, the mayor of Dollard-Des Ormeaux, the number of houses in the municipality affected by the floods could be up to 1,500.
Bottausci explains the city’s water systems were made according to North American engineering standards, and they hold 80 to 90 millimetres of water over the spam of a couple of days. He says the heavy rain that fell last weekend was between 150 to 170 millimetres in the spam of 45 minutes.
“To conceptualize that, because a lot of people don’t know what that means, that’s anywhere between five to seven feet of snow being dumped on you in 45 minutes to an hour-and-a-half,” said Bottausci.
The municipality says efforts are underway to strengthen flood mitigation strategies as extreme rainfall once again hit the West Island; there is a series of projects coming up that would help prevent more flooding.
Tecumseh Street is under construction for an underground stormwater retention basin that will hold 600,000 litres of water.
In the meantime, the City of DDO has around 13 teams on the ground trying to clean up after the flood, with some of those crews coming from neighbouring boroughs private contractors.
“We’re all working hard, we’re doing our best,” said Antoine Lambert, part of a cleanup crew from Roxboro.
