Flood fighters provide plenty of inspiration

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/05/2011 (5328 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

That people living within Winnipeg’s city limits tend to ignore events which occur beyond them is an established fact in Manitoba. It even has a name: Perimeteritis.

However, when a natural disaster — make that a mostly natural disaster — unfolds in our own backyard, even we city-dwellers sit up and take notice.

And so it is that the one-in-300-year flood of the usually not so mighty Assiniboine River and the chaos it has caused in communities throughout central Manitoba has caught the attention of pretty much everyone in the province — certainly every news media outlet and not just the local ones, either. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time Manitoba has been featured so prominently on consecutive episodes of CBC’s The National.

You can’t blame them. Crises make for gripping stories, especially when they’re accompanied by compelling visuals like the kind coming out of Manitoba’s flood zone in recent weeks: aerial photographs of acres of farmland-turned ocean, snaking lines of Canadian troops heaving sandbag after sandbag, and perhaps most compelling of all, the frantic efforts of area residents trying to save their homes and farms from the rising water — or, at the very least, mitigate the destruction that is slowly but surely creeping its way towards them.

Exhaustion etched on their faces, the look in their eyes speaks volumes. Rural folks are tough — soft-handed urbanites conceded this to be true long ago — but people can only bear so much. After putting their regular lives on indefinite hold to fight what could still prove to be an unwinnable battle, much of it in below-normal temperatures and relentless, driving sleet (Mother Nature’s way of rubbing salt on a wound, I suppose), the dikes aren’t the only things starting to crack.

Indeed, anxiety was beginning to taking its toll on residents in rural municipalities such as Headingley, St. Francois Xavier and Elie even before May 14’s intentional breach at the Hoop and Holler Bend (a downright charming colloquialism I had never heard of prior to this month; I blame Perimeteritis). I imagine it has only grown in the days since.

And yet, amid all the weariness and worry, another newsworthy narrative has emerged.

Determined to keep on keeping on, those directly affected by the flood have rallied together in the face of adversity, helped out by a legion of volunteers (city folk among them) who saw a need and stepped up to respond.

The stories are as plentiful as they are inspiring: neighbours methodically moving from house to house, working to protect each other’s homes; strangers showing up en masse to fill sandbags, shore up dikes and evacuate livestock; community women gathering in church basements to make hundreds of sandwiches; businesses contributing supplies and money.

Even the weather started co-operating.

Floods being what they are, the fate of many rural communities remains unclear. In some — particularly those on the banks of Lake Manitoba, which now appears to be the new front line in a fight that’s far from over — the worst may be yet to come.

But from this outsider’s perspective, the best has already shown itself.

Marlo Campbell sends warm — and dry — Winnipeg wishes to her rural neighbours.