For a couple of hours Wednesday night roads turned to rivers in Bancroft as downtown streets, businesses and homes were suddenly flooded.
My Bancroft Now spoke with Town of Bancroft Manager of Infrastructure, Jake Krupa, who gave an overview of the events:
“There’s a beaver dam up on the hill here that broke. A large amount of water came down through here, it was about 2 1/2 hours of water” he said.
“The damage, we’ve got road damage here, our water treatment plants okay…it could have been a lot worse.”
Krupa said it was fortunate it happened in the evening when people were home and they were able to protect houses.
He said they are working to get things back in order.
“So we’re just dealing with the cleanup now. We plan to have this road back open. It’ll be a granular surface and then, hopefully, we’ll be paving that again in a few weeks”
My Bancroft Now spoke with Andy from Northern Rural Net (next door to Shoppers Drug Mart) where a group were piling sandbags into a truck to return to the fire department.
He says when the water first came they didn’t know what was going on:
“We thought at first just a water main had broken” he said, “Then we got the call from people saying that it’s actually flooding in the doors and we needed to start getting sandbags and towels and everything and try and keep everything out”
Andy said that a lot of staff come back as well as people form the apartments above the store to help. The fire department also arrived with sandbags.
Dave Ho from Daves Place says he wasn’t expecting a flood either:
“Water (was) flowing down. I thought it was the manhole got plugged or something so I was trying to get something to see if I can open it and then all of a sudden water is coming towards the door and then just keeps rising like a river.”
Dave said the fire department was there helping out with sandbags and a pump.
He said he was up until 3:30 a.m. getting the water out so he could open up Dave’s Place Thursday morning.
Cavelle, the property manager for Woodview Lane, says she called the town as soon as the water started:
“In just a few minutes the town and the fire department were on scene. They had sandbags. I just can’t say enough” she said.
The storm drains did their job, she noted.
Fire Chief Matt Musclow who was back doing follow up at Woodview Lane this morning said they worked to keep water from basements on Woodview Lane last night:
“We had sandbags and tried to divert as much of the water away from the houses, as we could ”
Cavelle expressed her gratitude for all the people from the Town of Bancroft, including office staff, who showed up to help.
” They’re amazing. Our town is so fortunate with the wonderful people that we have living and working here”
OPP assisted in traffic control between Hastings Street at Snow Road and Hastings Street at Station Street on Wednesday night. They said there were no known injuries from the events.
