The anniversary of when West Nipissing declared a state of emergency over flooding is fast approaching.
With that anniversary set to fall on Friday, Mayor Joanne Savage took time to recall what the landscape of the municipality looked like at the time.
“It seems like yesterday,” Savage said. “It was May 8th last year when I declared the emergency due to the flood. We had issues with residents stranded on roads where they were completely flooded and there was a risk personal dwelling. We’re fortunate this year that we are not in the same predicament.”
“The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) in North Bay provides a weekly update pertaining to the watershed conditions,” she added. “The last one that was received was April 28th and that identified that there were high flows and melting ice that could be dangerous for anglers, boaters, and swimmers, but there’s no flooding that is expected.”
Last year’s flooding resulted in damages to homes, and the closing of roadways, but Savage says they are being proactive in hopes of avoiding a similar fate the next time flooding threatens the municipality.
“I know that the incident commander of the emergency group attends weekly conference calls with the MNRF,” she explained. “This way, we’re being updated on a regular basis so the forecast is that we’re not going to be experiencing what we experienced last year.”
According to Savage, the municipality was busy last summer with repairing what they could from the flooding in order to have West Nipissing as back to normal as it could be.
“We’re back to square one before the flooding,” she said. “Most of the repairs that were required were mostly the infrastructure of our roads and those were repaired after the flooding. We had an expenditure of roughly $370,000 and unfortunately, we didn’t meet the threshold to receive support from the provincial government for the repairs that were done.”
“At the end, we wanted to make sure our infrastructure was fixed and that people would still have good roads to travel on,” Savage added.
