Memories of 1997 flood back for Manitobans 25 years later, though many want to move on

Jacques Courcelles still vividly recalls his parents' refrigerator floating in the kitchen, anchored like a boat, its cord still attached to the wall outlet under water.

"My parents had water over top of the kitchen counters. The air in the fridge was what was making the fridge float," he said, his mind flashing back to April 30, 1997, when the community of Ste. Agathe was first to fall to the Flood of the Century.

"My parents lost their home. They had to rebuild. I had to rebuild. But deep down in my heart, I knew it could and should have been different," said Courcelles, who was manning pumping stations in town this week as the engorged Red River is once again spilling its banks and spreading across southern Manitoba, reclaiming a floodplain that once belonged to ancient Lake Agassiz.

Ste. Agathe, 30 kilometres south of Winnipeg, is better prepared this time.

In 1997, a body of water 40 kilometres wide by 75 kilometres long formed across the flat farmland. More than 22,000 people were chased out of 20 communities in the Red River Valley.

Towns with ring dikes resembled islands in the growing sea.

Ste. Agathe did not have such a barrier. It sits at the highest elevation between the U.S. border and Winnipeg, and had never been seriously impacted by a flood.

It always got by with a temporary dike built along the road between the town and the river, to the east, supplemented by other dikes to the south and north.

That's not where the water came from in '97. It arrived in waves from the flat fields to the west, crossing railroad tracks and Highway 75, both of which government officials believed were high enough to act as levees.

At 12:30 a.m. on April 29, the vast prairie ocean inundated Ste. Agathe, with two metres of water swallowing the roads, lapping against buildings and washing into homes, businesses and the school.

"The water came over the highway by six inches," said Courcelles, who raised concerns days before the crest reached town about the lack of protection on that side.

In the days that followed, as the winds died down and the water stood still, the town looked like it had been built on a mirror.

There were reflections of houses in the water everywhere, said Eugène Lemoine, now 73, and the fourth generation of Lemoines to live in Ste. Agathe.

"The thing that struck me most was how silent it was. That's something you can't imagine — total silence in a community, especially when you live beside a highway," he said.