'It's totally disheartening:' cabin owners watch property flood due to broken culvert
CBC
As the rain started to fall toward the end of March, Doug Allen sensed the inevitable.
He moved the furniture out of his cabin. The unwanted visitor he had dreaded for years arrived about a week later.
"The water was rising one inch per hour on the lake," he said in an interview.
The cabin Allen and his family have is on property they bought in North Kemptville, Yarmouth County, in 1988. It is beside Duck Lake.
It is a place where they went to swim and kayak, fish and relax. But in recent years the property has not been that relaxing and after water got inside the building earlier this month, Allen fears it won't be salvageable.
After years of losing hectares of land to the flooding, the cabin damage adds insult to injury.
"It's totally disheartening," said Allen. "We don't get a chance to enjoy the property anymore, and that's sad."
Perhaps most frustrating for Allen is that he's known for years that this could happen. Despite his many efforts to seek intervention through government departments and other means, nothing has been done.
Allen has watched things change for the worse since a culvert located down from his property on Golden Forest Road was damaged during a flood in 2010.
Through the years it's rusted and collapsed at one end, creating a backup. What was once a brook feeding into the culvert down from Duck Lake has become a sort of artificial lake, drowning trees and swamping the shoreline in the process. Allen isn't the only one impacted by the flooding.
"We've got a lot of tree loss and I've got a lot of property on the other side of the brook that's not accessible for most parts of the year," said Lindsay Burrill, who owns property near Allen.
Burrill's family has owned land in this area for more than 100 years. The damage in the last decade related to the flooding has limited his ability to hunt or do forestry work to produce firewood and get sawmill logs, he said.
The fact that Golden Forest Road is a private road has complicated the problem.
For years, tracking down the owner was a challenge, and efforts to get them to make repairs proved futile. The local municipality had no authority to get involved.
