From the Desk of Murray Lincoln: Coming through the Floods in Saskatchewan

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Today’s Blog Post

Coming through the Floods in Saskatchewan
My wife’s encouragement were words that went like this… “Keep going… keep going… slowly… keep going…”. Then she took our camera to take a photo of a cute duck swimming by her passenger side window. It was as close as if we were in a boat… the water was up to the lower part of the car door and rising as we went along.

This is not normally where we take our drives together. Our vehicle was not a boat – yet we were far from shore and in fact in the middle of the raging flood waters in the middle of the prairies of Saskatchewan.

We were on our trip by car back to Winnipeg after spending a wonderful weekend in Regina with our friends.

We had stopped in Indian Head, Saskatchewan at the grocery store to buy something for lunch and then headed out on to the highway again.

The radio reports were from all over the province about the terrible rain storms that had been hitting the south eastern part of the province. In one storm more than 4 and ½ inches had come down. And now the water was trying to find ways to get to lower ground – or into the ground.

Do you know…? Water falling on the prairie doesn’t have a lot of choices as to where low ground is. It is all flat. And when the ground is completely saturated with water from days and weeks before – there is no place for it to go down… it just gets deeper and deeper.

And if there is a low spot – it will flow that way.

Heading east and passing Sintaluta, Saskatchewan we couldn’t see any flooding yet. The radio had told us that there was some problem on the west bound lanes earlier.

As we came over the hill… I said to Alida, “Oh, Oh, it looks like we have got problems up ahead.”

There was a truck sitting on the highway with its emergency lights blinking. Cars were stopped on the highway and ahead of them was a literal lake across the highway. It was more than two city blocks across on our side. On the west bound lanes it was far bigger and much deeper.

There were no cars over there. Only semi-trailers that were slowly going through deeper water in the west bound lanes. The water was over their front wheels and each truck was creating a wake rolling out each side.

After looking the situation over carefully and considering the alternatives… it was better to go into the water and move ahead slowly. If we turned around we had to drive one hour back and then two hours north across a deep valley. Some of the roads that way were closed also.

I watched the car in front of us that was about the same size… he went into the small lake and then further and further… no apparent problems… so I followed.

“Keep going… keep going… slowly… keep going…” Alida kept saying.

When we exited the flood water we both sighed deeply.

We continued to listen to the radio reports on the way to Brandon. Just moments after we exited the flood we heard they closed 160 kms of the highway from Balgonie to Whitewood! Most of the way to Brandon there were no cars on our side of the road. Everyone was on the other side of flood waters.

This morning early it was reported that one the semi-trailer trucks had rolled over in the deep water. I hope the driver was okay and I wonder what his family thought when they saw his truck on the TV news?

We were very fortunate to have left on the trip when we did. The alternatives were not good. The six hour trip could have been ten.

Did you know I have an amazing wife that loves adventure? Hokey Mokey!

~ Murray Lincoln ~
http://www.murraylincoln.com/