Grand Bay-Westfield Prepares For Spring Freshet

The COVID-19 pandemic is making preparations for this year’s spring freshet a bit more complicated than usual.

Troy Gautreau, the fire chief in Grand Bay-Westfield, said their primary concerns are around physical distancing.

“Typically in the spring freshet when we distribute sandbags, it’s large groups of people up at a gravel pit owned by one of the local contractors, they’re filling sandbags in close proximity,” said Gautreau.

Gautreau said the town purchased a sandbagging machine before the pandemic to reduce the amount of labour.

He said to maintain physical distancing, they can only fill one bag at a time, but it is still quicker than by hand.

Gautreau said they are in the process of contacting property owners to see how many sandbags they would need should water levels reach that threshold.

Council recently approved a flood response policy which lays out exactly what will be done and when, he said.

“Once we reach warning stage at 3.7 metres, that’s when our municipal operations centre will activate. Flood stage is 4.2, that’s when we’ll start staging all of our sandbag inventory and start getting ready for distribution and so on,” said Gautreau.

With major flooding during the past two spring freshets, Gautreau said residents and the community as a whole learned a great deal about the best ways to deal with the impacts.

He said water levels are a bit higher than at this time last year, but more ice has broken up further upriver.

“The overall outlook is optimistically hopeful, but all it takes is one or two good rainstorms that aren’t in the weather forecast yet to have a major impact,” he said.

“There’s nothing you can do to stop Mother Nature completely.”