Eerie existence for Dauphin Lake holdout

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This article was published 09/06/2011 (5259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DAUPHIN LAKE — It’s a peaceful feeling being the last one left in an evacuation zone, said Denise Penrose, who has stayed back at her permanent home on Dauphin Lake since last Saturday’s evacuation order.

If you leave, you can’t come back. That’s the rule. So she has stayed with the home on Crescent Cove, while husband Mike left to continue his medical practice in Dauphin.

It’s not quite a Robinson Crusoe existence — Penrose still has her phone and email — but she is getting inventive. She made an outdoor shower by screwing a shower head onto a garden house, and securing it in the teeth of an upside-down rake that’s wedged into a step ladder.

“I’ve had a few little moments of loneliness,” Penrose conceded, while tending to a sandbag dike around the property and five pumps. “(But) I’ve actually enjoyed it. It’s kind of surreal.”

Another stop in Manitoba, another water body, another flood.

Perhaps because of its distance from Winnipeg, most people don’t realize how badly properties around Dauphin Lake were hit by flooding in last week’s wind and rainstorm. The Free Press was taken into the evacuated zone by motorboat, courtesy of David Adams and with the RM of Ochre River’s blessing.

Seven cottages have been dislodged from their footings and flood waters surround nearly 150 cottages. One cottage had its front deck picked up and heaved through the front living-room wall. The cottage is a writeoff. Many cottages have waves splashing against their walls.

“I’ve got waterfront on all four sides,” quipped Larry Livingston, whose cottage is an old log cabin that once served as the warden’s residence at the north entrance of Riding Mountain National Park.

And the lake still hasn’t crested. It’s expected to rise another foot by late June.

Unlike Lake Manitoba, Dauphin Lake’s flooding was purely from natural causes. Riding Mountain to the south, Duck Mountain to the north and a host of creeks and rivers, drain into Dauphin Lake. Riding Mountain had over five feet of snow this winter.

So the province’s offer of compensation to cottagers flooded on Lake Manitoba — which received unnatural flow from the Assiniboine River via the Portage Diversion — doesn’t apply here.

“We don’t get a penny and we’re going to lose our cabin,” Vivian Podworny said.

On the other hand, many people have built or converted cottages into year-round homes on Dauphin Lake in recent years — it’s a short commute to the City of Dauphin — and their permanent homes are eligible for compensation.

That creates an anomaly no one wants, said Clinton Cleave, reeve for the RM of Ochre River, where most properties have been damaged. “We have to work toward a compensation package for everyone,” he said.

Dauphin Lake is large — 520 square kilometres in area. Cottagers include people like former hockey stars Butch Goring and Ron Low (they’re neighbours).

The current flood is at least a foot higher than the last flood in 1974, said Bob Gardner, spotted knocking stakes into the ground to mark off the submerged roadway in the Laguna Beach area.

“We had been sandbagging for five weeks here but we were still just one big storm away from flooding,” he said. Winds reached up to 79 kilometres per hour, and waves two to three metres high crashed through most people’s flood walls. About five metres of landscaped lakefront have been washed away in front of many cottages, and that’s all they had to begin with.

“How do we estimate the damage when we’re only a month into this thing?” said Cleave, the reeve. “We’ve got a whole summer to go of high water and potential high winds.”

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca