200 year flood

[buckworks]

On Sunday night we started getting emergency alerts on our cell phones. Usually those alarms turn out to be nothing-burgers.

Not this time.

My location, the town of Minitonas, Manitoba, got nearly six inches of rain by sunrise on Monday, plus runoff from the mountain to the south.

They're calling it a 200-year flood.

There has been massive damage to infrastructure - roads and bridges washed out, even the railroad. The cleanup is going to take months, maybe even years.

Property damage has been huge, but except for our truck we had more mess than damage. My brother is facing major losses, though. The fact that we have a dirt crawl space instead of a finished basement turned out to be an advantage. It got flooded but there was nothing down there to be wrecked.

We've been on the news for all the wrong reasons. Our truck is famous!

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7232723

I'll say more later.

[ergophobe]

Yikes! 

The mud must be nasty to deal with.

Is your house functional?  Like can you cook and bathe?

The big floods often wipe out water and sewer infrastructure. 

[buckworks]

For a couple of days we had no power, water, phone, internet or cell service, and there was no access in or out of town even if we'd had a running vehicle.

It truly was YOYO time ... You're On Your Own.

We had enough supplies and tools on hand to muddle by for a few days, even weeks if we had to. We had water in jugs, juices in the cupboard, canned foods that could be eaten cold, that sort of thing. At one point Marcel cooked a small pot of spaghetti using his plumber's blowtorch! I had a Katadyn water filter in my supplies, but we haven't used it yet. We tried not to open the freezer, to keep it cold for as long as possible.

The water was back briefly on the second day, so we filed the bathtub ... which if we were smart we'd have done upon the first warnings on Sunday night. It's back and seems stable, but we're still under a boil water advisory.

For a while, when we didn't know if the sewer was working, we would pee in a bucket then toss it into the water rushing through our yard. I pointed out to Marcel that it would end up in Hudson's Bay!

To be continued ...