Flood watch continues as Montrealers prepare for rain – Montreal | 24CA News

With rain forecast for this weekend, residents in flood-prone areas round Montreal stay on excessive alert as they proceed to arrange for the worst.

“It’s a little bit scary,” stated Pierrefonds-Roxboro resident Mohamed Lamine, who lives simply metres away from the Rivière des Prairies and remembers how his home flooded in 2019.

Residents within the West Island borough discovered in the course of the flood that 12 months, in addition to one other in 2017, that they want one another, and that’s the reason the borough is as soon as once more counting on a military of volunteers to arrange.

So far they’ve primarily helped construct dikes with sandbags.

“We had 64 addresses where we delivered sandbags,” defined metropolis councillor Benoit Langevin. Bags are going “mainly elders, mainly people who weren’t able to lift 60 bags of 66 pounds,” he stated.

That effort continued Saturday with about 30 volunteers constructing dikes to guard weak houses close to the waterfront.

But the folks donating their time level out that they do greater than that.

“We help residents in any way we can, even just providing somebody to talk to or whatever they need at the moment,” stated resident Cameron Stoute, who additionally volunteered in the course of the 2017 and 2019 floods.

He added that the group additionally helps reassure folks dwelling within the space.

City officers say that they’re prepared for any eventuality and that even when issues don’t go as badly as they did over the last two large floods, folks shouldn’t let their guard down.

“There are so many factors that come into play,” Langevin stated, including these embrace “rain or a lot of snow melt in another area that produces a lot of water.”

He’s urging folks to maintain flood installations in place, at the very least till mid-May, simply to be on the secure facet.

The borough can even proceed to construct a pool of volunteers, simply in case issues worsen.