Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
Jacques Courcelles still vividly recalls his parents' refrigerator floating in the kitchen, anchored like a boat, its cord still attached to the wall outlet under water. "My parents had water over top of the kitchen counters. The air in the fridge was what was making the fridge float," he said, his mind flashing back to April 30, 1997, when the community of Ste. Agathe was first to fall to the Flood of the Century.
As southern Manitoba saw a deluge of rain this weekend that forced people in several communities from their homes due to flooding, the province said the region saw four to six times the normal amount of precipitation this spring. Southern and southeastern Manitoba, along with the portion of the Red River basin in the United States, have received 120 to 160 millimetres of snow and rain since April 1 — which is between 400 to 600 per cent of normal, the province said in a flood bulletin on Sunday evening. The same region received a basin-wide average of 40 to 50 millimetres of rainfall over the past 48 hours alone, according to the province.
Manitoba's flood forecasters are keeping an eye on a spring storm that the province says could dump 30 to 80 centimetres of snow on southern Manitoba in the next week. In a Saturday flood bulletin, the province said the system may result in a mix of snow and rain between Tuesday and Friday. Temperatures are forecast to drop to below freezing by Wednesday and remain below freezing until April 19 in most locations, the province said. Runoff from the forecast precipitation is not expected to start before April 20, according to the bulletin.
The province says it is preparing to activate the Red River Floodway to manage water levels within Winnipeg in the next 24 to 48 hours due to rising water levels that have been accelerated by this week's weather. The Red River's spring crest isn't expected in Winnipeg until sometime from April 9-16. However, the precipitation Manitoba has seen in the last two days, along with the gradual snowmelt occurring in the river basins, could raise levels above the riverbanks at some spots in the Red River Valley, the province said in a news release Wednesday.
On the rack in the backyard, the little red canoe is withdrawn, overturned and not liking it, and the crest of snow on the canvas is visible along the tumblehome. It yearns for open water now closing in on this writer. Back in 2007, after much input from listeners and a panel of judges, the CBC Radio show Sounds Like Canada picked the canoe as one of the country's seven wonders. One of those judges was Roy MacGregor. “It may have been the promise of a railroad to the Pacific that made Canada whole,” writes Roy in his book, Original Highways: Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada, "but it was rivers that carried the people west and made that railroad necessary.”
