The darkest day

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/05/2021 (1798 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s been called Black Friday, a day in which Winnipeg realized it was going to be on the losing end of its 1950 flood fight.

The rain fell steadily throughout May 5, several dikes were on the verge of being breached and, late in the evening, sirens wailed alerting residents to evacuate.

W.D. Hurst, City of Winnipeg engineer, later described in a report how the city’s efforts in fighting the historic flood shifted in a matter of hours:

“About midnight I was summoned to an emergency meeting in the Premier’s office in the legislative building where the entire situation was reviewed. Present were representatives of all three levels of government.

It became apparent that the Red River Valley was faced with a disaster of the first magnitude, and that the Canadian Army with its power of command and its ability to obtain the necessary resources must be placed in charge of the flood fight…. While we sat at the meeting, we could hear the sirens blowing and knew that at least some of our efforts had come to naught.

“By the following morning, the Riverview and Point Douglas dikes in Winnipeg and the Wildwood dike in Fort Garry had failed and complete evacuation of the districts was ordered. During the night the patients at the municipal hospitals had been transferred to Deer Lodge Hospital in St. James. Norwood and Provencher Bridges were temporarily closed and underpasses all over the city were flooded due to sewer backup and hundreds of basements were inundated.

“Other dikes too had failed or were on the verge of failure and the course of the flood had changed from the defensive to the relief stages.”

All told, more than 100,000 people were evacuated, 10,000 homes were flooded, one-eighth of the city was submerged and one person had died. It was an unprecedented calamity at the time; then-Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent called it the “most catastrophic flood ever seen in Canada.”