WINNIPEG – Weeks after heavy rains triggered widespread flooding across southern Manitoba, many communities are still grappling with the aftermath and the lasting impacts left behind. Although most of the floodwaters have receded, the damage to infrastructure remains. In Dauphin, Man., about 250 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, flooding caused severe damage to the city’s hospital, forcing it to close. According to a recent update from Prairie Mountain Health, there is “significant damage” to critical infrastructure, such as the elevators and HVAC system. Officials said it could be months before the hospital is fully repaired. “There’s still all kinds of electrical, mechanical and structural assessments going on while they clean the facility.” said David Bosiak, the mayor of Dauphin. Bosiak says the city has been assured there are enough ambulances to serve the needs of the residents in Dauphin but says the closure is more of an inconvenience than anything else. “We’re also concerned about all the other services that occur at the hospital, like phlebotomy, blood services, X-Ray, diagnostics that now aren’t locally available, so that has an impact on primary care,” he said. “We have patients that are getting chemotherapy treatment or dialysis and they’re a little further away. Finally, we had 54 people that were evacuated from the Dauphin Hospital, and many of them are spread out all over Prairie Mountain Health facilities, and that is an inconvenience for their family.” In addition to the hospital closure, Bosiak says around 1,000 homes in the city were impacted by flooding. In the Swan River Valley region, just west of the city, more than 300 different sites, including roads, bridges and culverts were damaged. Reeve Bill Gade says in terms of overall damage, this is one of the hardest hit years the region has ever seen. “This is something we’ve never seen before,” he said, adding repairs so far have already cost more than $40 million with many areas in the region still being assessed. “The budget for our municipality is a little over $4 million a year, so to put that in perspective, we’re talking about ten years of our entire budget in damage, just in a couple days, which is significant for us,” he said. Heavy rainfall in June caused widespread flooding across Manitoba, including in the Interlake region, where it’s not just roads that were impacted, but farmers’ fields too. Allan Olinyk’s soybean crops in St. Andrew’s, Man., about 25 kilometres north of Winnipeg, have been filled with water for weeks. He says poor infrastructure and drainage are causing algae to form on his fields. “This is the storm of the century that hit us here,” he said. “With failing infrastructure, we knew we were going to get it bad here, and as you can see, this is the effects of it. It’s devastating to see.” He says more than 40 hectares of his crop have been lost this growing season due to excessive water. Flood recovery program expanded Earlier this week, the Manitoba government expanded eligibility for its flood recovery assistance program to include more communities that were ravaged by heavy rainfalls in June. This includes the city of Dauphin. “Large areas experienced multiple heavy rainfall events throughout June, resulting in significant flooding, causing extensive damage to homes, farms, businesses and public buildings,” said Lisa Naylor, Manitoba’s Transportation and Infrastructure Minister, in a release earlier this week. “This expansion ensures that communities are provided with the essential support they need to recover and build mitigation strategies for the future,” Naylor said. The government launched three Disaster Financial Assistance (DFA) programs, as well as a one-time Manitoba Flood Recovery Program (MFRP), which was created to “assist homeowners and tenants in particularly hard-hit areas who may not have qualified for DFA if flood insurance was available for their property.” The Association of Manitoba Municipalities (AMM) says a lot of communities across the province are dealing with the impacts of major flooding for the first time. “It’s a very unfortunate situation,” said Denys Volkov, who is the executive director of the AMM. “We had a lot of damage in the Interlake and a lot of damage in the Parkland region, and the damage that is there is still being assessed, but we are talking about hundreds of sites of municipal infrastructure that was damaged.” He says they will continue to work with both the provincial and federal governments to address the needs of residents who remain impacted. “At the same time, we need to make sure that the roads are open for a lot of producers, the roads are open for trade, so we need to make sure bridges are repaired, roads are repaired, culverts are repaired,” he said. “Our members are dealing with a lot of issues that are coming at them at the same time.” With files from CTV’s Kayla Rosen
