Flood Watch 2014

Posted On April 23, 2014

Happy Easter to All!
And Perth-Andover has so far received the very best Easter present of all…. No flood. We dodged the bullet for another year, but what about the years to come?
 
Beleaguered village residents have lived through what seems like the longest and most suspenseful horror movie ever, a movie that simply would not end…. We’ve been living the Nightmare in the Village for an entire week.
 

For seven days, at this point as I write, some residents have been out of their homes, businesses closed and evacuated their premises and we’ve all watched the river with white knuckles, wondering if and when it was going to come over the banks and into our village.
 

Folks were left scrambling for updates and information, and most people were getting their news from locals who were actually watching the river, or posts on Facebook instead of EMO or the Riverwatch website, both of which were noticeably behind the times when it came to reporting new developments.
 

Riverwatch updates were few and far between, in spite of the early detection flood monitoring system they are supposedly using. The updates that EMO did report were frightening in the extreme. At 7 pm on Thursday evening, EMO reported that a 35 kilometre long ice jam was headed for Perth, and we were virtually guaranteed that we could expect flooding as severe as, or even worse, than the levels we saw in 2012, and we could look for this to hit at 11 pm that night.
 

Fortunately, this dire prediction did not come to pass, but it ratcheted up the stress factor to almost unbearable levels. Nerves have been frayed to the breaking point, and people were venting their frustrations via social media which saw a number of flame wars and shoot outs at the Facebook Corral.
 

Although Perth-Andover escaped being flooded this year, many other communities were not so fortunate as flooding hit other areas hard all over the province This widespread flooding and destruction at record levels has surely driven home the message that we are all at risk, and the situation is only going to get worse. There has been no river maintenance, more extensive clear-cutting is planned, and the
provincial government has steadfastly refused to explore ice management options that other provinces are successfully using to keep their own people and communities safe when their rivers develop ice jams and flood situations.
 

Of course, this lack of river and ice maintenance may just be part of a bigger plot to eradicate us pesky, money sucking rural communities, in which case their strategy is, of course, quite brilliant. It’s sure working to destroy Perth-Andover.
 

But, if we are going to save and revitalize our rural communities, we need action. A brief bit of internet exploring reveals numerous videos of cities blasting ice jams with explosives, smashing them with state of the art ice breaking equipment (ironically, some of this equipment, the ice smashing “Frogs”, are made in New Brunswick by Eco Technologies, in Caraquet. Made in NB, used everywhere else but New Brunswick…)
 

It would be much better, of course, if our rivers were properly maintained, dredged and cleared.
 

And in a more perfect world, it will be wonderful when we are finally allowed access to suppressed energy technologies so we don’t need river killing dams for hydro-electric power.
 

But in the meantime, we have to work with what we have.
 

This is an election year. What do you want to see for the future of our province?