Standing on guard

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/06/2011 (5320 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Carl Erickson stood on a dike that looms three metres high beside his home at Lundar Beach Saturday and vowed to hold back the flood.

On the Lake Manitoba side, a rising wall of water is halfway up the dike.

“This was going to be our retirement home,” Erickson said.

As he peered at the lake, a backhoe added scoops full of sticky, yellow clay to the dike in a race to beat the water.

The 110 homes at Lundar Beach and Sugar Point, about 145 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, are bookends on a bay off Lake Manitoba.

Just like the homes at Delta Beach and Twin Beach, they face a wall of water. But there’s one difference: Their homes aren’t swamped — yet.

Both communities were ordered to evacuate three weeks ago when road access to Sugar Point was washed out.

This weekend, the local municipality allowed residents back to shore up dikes: A handful of people loaded 60,000 sandbags Saturday.

They say they desperately need volunteers before they’re ordered out at sunset tonight, but few answered the call Saturday.

Erickson’s bungalow is the beachhead.

When a dike surrendered to the lashing of two-metre-high waves during a windstorm June 1, a dozen metres of shoreline vanished under the water.

The Erickson house appeared to be lost.

The RM of Lundar responded to frantic calls at 4 a.m. by dispatching a backhoe that made it just in time.

The hoe dredged up clay at the Ericksons’ doorstep and dumped it into a mound at the foot of the bungalow’s driveway. It created a temporary levee.

The Ericksons almost lost their home that night, but the dike held and cottagers along Vincent Road were safe.

“Carl used his house as a temporary dike,” said Pat Dunlop, a cottager and past president of the cottagers association.

For the past three weeks, the backhoe has stayed on the site and RM officials have patrolled the area from dawn to dusk.

A three-metre-high ring dike four kilometres long has been built around Lundar Beach. Metres away from the Ericksons’ house, it keeps the wall of water at bay.

That ring dike is one of two, one inside the other, that work to keep the only road in and out high and dry.

Next to the Ericksons’ retirement home, machinery runs day and night to pump out water rising inside the inner ring dike. Without the pump, the road would be drowned and the house flooded out by now.

Up and down Vincent Road, residents frantically shored up sandbag dikes Saturday and vented their frustration at the province.

Some loaded up trucks and moved their furniture out, figuring the water will win.

Residents complain the lake levels are artificially high, the province’s $90,000 cap on cottage compensation is too stingy, and the province is holding off on committing to pour in the millions it’ll take to open up a channel and flush high water levels out.

“Whatever urgency they had with Hoop and Holler (bend near Portage la Prairie), they have to do the same here,” cottager John McFerron insisted. “We’re coming up to a provincial election and I don’t think any of the parties want to commit money to it, but we’ve got to bring the lake levels down.”

People here want a megaproject to flush out the lake and lower water levels. Without it, they say, they’re sunk.

“The province has to declare a state of emergency for the whole province in order to be able to commit the money. That’s my understanding,” Dunlop said.

Many believe the looming election brings them closer to a drop-dead deadline: July 4. After that date, they say, the incumbent government is prevented by Manitoba’s election laws from committing to major spending.

Down Vincent Road, Donna and Darryl Rudge said the political irony of it all rang home in a phone call Saturday.

Donna Rudge said she answered the call at the couple’s only home to a hapless provincial party fundraiser. “They said they were looking for donations. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” Rudge said. Her husband took the phone and told the caller to “Quit dumping six-foot walls of water on us.”

It was a short call.

So far, residents have praised local government officials, but some residents say they’ll level the lash at the local reeve today for ordering the evacuation in the first place.

Everywhere on this road, people say they are exhausted and stressed-out.

“We’re probably the last community left standing,” Dunlop said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca