Water’s devastation can leave emotional scars

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/04/2009 (6009 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Julia Pawluk was 19 and a victim of the 1950 flood when she was appointed the unofficial Flood Relief Queen of Canada.

Hers is a little-known story in Winnipeg history, a footnote to the devastation that swept across the province with the raging rivers.

Pawluk was plucked from obscurity, put on an airplane and sent to Vancouver to meet dignitaries, make speeches and raise money for flood relief efforts.

"I felt so overwhelmed," the retired teacher said Monday. "I had never done anything like this. I was so scared."

She was seen off at the Winnipeg airport by then-mayor Garnet Coulter and greeted on the other end by Vancouver mayor Charles Thompson.

Her father, Percy Pawluk, was allowed onto the plane to see she was properly settled in before take off.

"He was so proud of me," she remembers. "He was ill but he was there."

A picture shot by a Free Press photographer shows Pawluk, dressed in a smart suit and a hat, standing on the stairs leading up to the plane. Her father looks on.

Her aunt, along with Mayor Coulter and his wife were also at the airport.

Once in Vancouver, Pawluk was the guest of honour at the British Columbia Young Liberal Association’s annual ball. Pawluk remembers speaking in other smaller communities and farmers selling off their cattle to raise funds for the effort.

"The flood was already diminishing when I went, but there was so much damage. It was terrible."

She’s still not sure why she was chosen, other than being in the right place at the right time. It was a thrill at a time when her life was in turmoil.

Her family’s Point Douglas home had been ruined in the flood. Water stood four feet deep in the living room for three weeks and the mud was up to the ankles.

Pawluk, now 79, remembers the heartbreak of the cleanup efforts.

"I remember my father going into the house in hip-waders," she says. "There was so much damage."

Her father had suffered a heart attack and lost his job in the months before the flood. She gets teary when she talks about the burden of the damage.

"This was so difficult for him. He was completely desolate."

Pawluk had finished her first year of university when the flood hit but her family’s diminished resources forced her to quit and get a job.

"When I think about it I wonder how I did it," she muses.

She suspects that because she traveled under the aegis of the Liberal Party, her family received some small assistance in their rebuilding efforts.

Pawluk still lives in the same two-storey Point Douglas house that was wrecked by the flood. It was rebuilt and, but for some years when she travelled, has remained her home ever since.

Bookcases built by her father serve as a reminder of her past.

She was not affected by the flood of 1997, save for some water in her basement. She’s been fine this year.

Pawluk has tremendous sympathy for the current crop of flood victims.

"When I see these people, I feel so sorry for them. A lot of them were flooded in 1997. My God, they can’t go through this again.

"Your life’s work disappears and you have to start again."

But she’s gratified this year’s victims will get government compensation, more than was offered to her family.

"We survived," she says. "Somehow we survived."

But, more than half a century later, she says the scars are still there.

"You can’t ever forget it."

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca