More than 10,000 evacuations near Montreal

More than 10,000 residents of a flooded municipality west of Montreal were evacuated urgently between Saturday evening and Sunday after the breakup of a dike, while significant floods affecting eastern
Canada have now exceeded the record levels of 2017.

A vegetal dyke protecting the city of Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, on the edge of the Lake of Two Mountains in flood, a few tens of kilometers from Montreal, gave way on Saturday night. This rupture caused a surge of water, sometimes 1.5 meters, in several areas of the city, without casualties, according to the police.

Animals abandoned to their fate

"We did not have time to do anything (…), I just had time to take my medication," said a resident on the CBC. Some people said that in an emergency, they could not bring their pets.

Several hundred police, military and firefighters evacuated nearly 2,600 homes in the night from Saturday to Sunday. Other evacuations were conducted Sunday, said a spokesman for the Sûreté du Québec. In total, more than a third of the city's population had to be relocated, and two shelters were opened.

Deployment of the armed forces

Following these evacuations, the Quebec authorities have given a new report: nearly 8,000 people have already been evacuated in Quebec for two weeks, and nearly 6,000 homes have been flooded. More than 1,700 military personnel have been deployed in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick to assist in the evacuation and erection of temporary dikes.

Faced with the rising waters in these three provinces, which should peak in the coming days according to the authorities, the federal capital Ottawa and the largest city in Quebec, Montreal, declared a state of emergency at the end of the week.

Fight against climate change

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who again went to the field near Ottawa with his son Saturday, said Sunday that these repeated floods forced the government to accelerate its fight against climate change.

The spring floods have so far killed only one person, a septuagenarian whose vehicle fell into a watercourse that cut in half the road on which she was driving near Pontiac (west of Ottawa).