The streets, basements and companies flooded after a torrential storm hit the city of Steinbach in southern Manitoba on Thursday night.
The vehicles were stranded in sudden lakes when the city, 40 kilometers southeast of Winnipeg, was beaten with 103 millimeters of rain in just four hours and 135 mm when everything stopped, according to Environment Canada.
“I was pouring as if you couldn’t believe,” said Coun. Bill Hiebert. “He had a call at 3 in the morning of a resident saying that he had three feet of water in his basement.”
It was worse for the Steinbach building and the Animal Rescue area, which received almost two meters (six feet) of water, according to Vice President Graham Pollock.
“We are in the process at this time to contact all our fosters to see who is open to take some of our cats that we have in the building. We have 22 cats and kittens in the building at this time, so we are in the process of moving them,” he said.
“Then we can start doing what we need to do in terms of pumping and removing water from the basement.”
The upper level of the building is where the animals are stored, but the lower level is where all food and dog food is stored, along with the sand and the kennels.
He continued that he was also full of items for a sales garage for sale planned for this weekend.
“And everything is floating right now. So I don’t know, it’s quite bad,” said Pollock, noting that the agency’s boardroom is also at the lower level.
The property returns to a stream that received a lot of rain and then swelled, overflowing its banks and flowing towards the animal rescue building through the wells of the basement windows, he said.
“Our insurance covers floods by land, but we are a non -profit organization and … Our deductible for our insurance is $ 25,000. This is a success that we could obviously allow ourselves to happen.”
The Environment Canada meteorologist, Chris Stammers, said that an electric storm line was formed south of Winnipeg on Thursday night, creating a narrow strip of heavy rains on the western to east line.
“We had what is called electric training storms, so a line that continually hits the same area,” he said.
Steinbach was the hardest. Sprague in the southeast corner was 84 mm, Marchand was 58 mm, St. Pierre-Jolys had 33 mm and Zhoda was 25 mm.
“Quite variable in short distances,” said Stammers. “It is a very humid mass of air for this time of year and that can produce the heavy rain we are seeing. It is certainly not a fall pattern that we are [typically] in.”
The high temperature of the day in Steinbach was from 18 C to 1 in the morning on Friday when that warm air moved to the city during the night.
The storm hit almost exactly one year since the last important flood incident in the city from September 16 to 17, 2024. That fell 156 mm of rain.
“We did not expect this type of rain again,” Hiebert said, added that the city is in the process of increasing the capacity of its sewerage system.
In an incident in which too much rain arrives in a short time, the current sewerage system cannot be kept up to date because many drainage people also enters it, so everything goes back, he said.
Hiebert said the streets were clear a couple of hours after the rain stopped and that the system could catch up.
For him personally, he learned from last year and added a sink bomb to his own home. While he did not prevent all the water from arriving, he certainly limited him, he said.
“I will have to dry a little, but I will not have the damage of $ 25,000 that I had last year.”
