The swollen river is just a few metres from the door of John Mills’s Quarterback Mobile. “It’s been non-stop,” Chang said, “and the ground is still muddy, which brings mud back into the store.” The flooding damaged his store’s inventory, boxes and equipment, though his exotic fish were spared. The water had almost entirely receded, leaving behind a film of red-brown dirt coating everything the water once touched. In the Halifax suburb of Bedford, power was out for many businesses and the hum of generators filled the air as owners assessed the damage caused by the weekend floodwater. While the floodwaters had largely receded by Sunday, they left behind a network of damaged and washed out roads and bridges in the province. It was the river choosing to take a different path.” “That created the massive current across the road. “The river discovered, as rivers will, that it could escape through those poor peoples’ property and out flow into the hay fields,” he said. He knows the area well and speculated that the nearby Meander River became a torrent and met resistance from a rising tide. For me personally, living here all these years, there’s never been anything as devastating as this.” “Our own worries about damaged driveways and such just dissipated and all we care about now is the kids and the other lost people …. “We gradually became more aware over Saturday morning that something terrible had happened down on the corner (at the home where the children were last seen),” he said in an interview on his front porch. Much of the search was being carried out on hay lands that Johnston owns. Paul Johnston, a local veterinarian, said that when he woke up on Saturday he walked down to the main road and saw the water rushing knee deep along the road. A man and a youth travelling in a second vehicle in the area were also reported missing. Police said the children were with three other people who managed to escape. On Saturday evening, an RCMP dive team recovered an unoccupied pickup truck in more than two metres of water and said it was believed to be the vehicle the children were travelling in. Helicopters could be seen flying overhead. Traffic was being diverted away from the search scene in the marshlands just off the Meander River, a winding tidal river that flows near the locations where the missing people were last seen about 55 kilometres northwest of Halifax. “We’re going to stay positive until we have some closure here,” Zebian said. The goal, he said, was to get the water level low enough that people can search the area by foot. “We can rebuild roads and bridges and buildings, but we can’t bring people back, and the legacy for these floods will be the incredibly tragic loss of life,” he said.Įarlier in the day, industrial pumps steadily emptied a flooded field as searchers scoured the area for the missing people.Ībraham Zebian, mayor of West Hants Regional Municipality, was at the site and said search teams were pumping more than 94,000 litres of water a minute from the field. Premier Tim Houston told reporters in Windsor Monday it was a “heartbreaking day” for the province. At least 50 roads sustained significant damage. Provincial officials said 25 bridges had been affected, with 19 damaged and six destroyed. There have been no other reports of missing people from the flooding, he said.Ī series of thunderstorms that began on Friday and stretched into the following day dumped up to 250 millimetres of rain on several parts of the province, washing out roads and bridges and causing widespread damage. Rob Frizzell said police are working with the medical examiner to identify the remains, but investigators have reason to believe they belong to one of the other three people missing. Police said they recovered the body of a 52-year-old man from Windsor, N.S., in a search area northwest of Halifax, while the second person’s remains were found on shore in a tidal area in the neighbouring county.įour people, including two children, were reported missing on Saturday when the two vehicles they were travelling in were submerged in the regional municipality of West Hants. RCMP in Nova Scotia said Monday they had found the body of a missing man and what they believe are remains of a second person swept away in massive flooding that hit the province on the weekend. Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows Tourism Guide.
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