Residents watch with anxiety
Residents near Portage La Prairie, Manitoba watched as the water came Sunday — a small blue ribbon on the horizon at first, slowly oozing across the flat Prairie landscape, creeping toward their homes and farmland.
"It's like in a scary movie when they play that suspension (music) and you know something's coming but you don't know what it is," Shea Doherty said on his family's farm just south of the Hoop and Holler bend, where the provincial government has initiated a deliberate flood.
"It's like you started to see faint blue along the trees a mile and a half away, and then you started seeing it get larger and larger, and it's like, `it's coming'."
From the edge of Doherty's property, a wide line of water was visible in the distance Sunday morning. The water was likely to be lapping at the edges of his property by early Monday, he said, but no one had given him an official estimate.
Thousands of sandbags surrounded his family's home, greenhouse and other buildings. They were stacked more than one metre high — a level that he said should keep the water at bay.
The Manitoba government cut a hole in a dike at an area called the Hoop and Holler bend Saturday to try to ease record-high water levels on the Assiniboine River. The controlled flood is expected to send water over more than 150 properties, and is being done to prevent a larger, uncontrolled flood that could affect many more people.
The water was spreading so slowly, it would be outpaced by someone walking next to it, Manitoba Infrastructure Minister Steve Ashton said.
More than 24 hours after the controlled flood began, it had spread only 3.2 kilometres to the south and 1.6 kilometres to the east. Some 150 people in the region had been evacuated as a precaution, but no homes had actually been flooded and only three homes had water touching the bottom of their protective dikes.
"The controlled release at the Hoop and Holler bend is working as we had hoped," Steve Topping, an executive director with the department of Water Stewardship, told reporters.
Army personnel, volunteers and work crews have spent days putting sandbags and water-filled tube dikes around homes and other buildings.
Much like the flood waters are expected to do in the coming days, army personnel have spread outward from the Hoop and Holler bend, going south and east in advance of the water and ensuring homes are protected.
Several military members were busy putting water-filled tube dikes around Bill Poppoff's home roughly seven kilometres southeast of the bend. The retiree was not expecting the water to reach his property for at least five more days, but was relieved to have the dike in place early.