By Kellah Lavoie

Montreal Lake evacuees back home

Jul 30, 2011 | 10:51 AM

Montreal Lake Cree Nation evacuees are back home.

Earlier this week, 200 were told to leave after a road had to be cut to let water flow out of the community – some were put up in hotels in Prince Albert. It was the second evacuation in the community is a little more than a week.

There were send home on Friday, said Richard Kent, commissioner for emergency and protective services with the Prince Albert Grand Council (PAGC).

“We did an assessment of the community in the morning and we gave the information to Chief Ed Henderson and he made the decision to send people home right after they had their dinner,” he said.

“It gave the community time to get ready for the return of the evacuees.”

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Montreal Lake Cree Nation has not had much rain in the past few days, it has helped water levels to drop in the area.

Crews installed seven new culverts into the road that had to be cut to let the water escape – it gives the road a total of nine culverts now.

“We’re hoping that those seven should handle the water flow now and hopefully we’re not going to have the water take out the road again,” Kent said.

The road has since been repaired. It is down to one lane and Kent said it is a dirt road so it gets muddy, but it can be travelled on.

The community is just hoping for some dryer weather.

“It all depends on Mother Nature if we get a lot of rainfall. Unfortunately our water table in Saskatchewan is up as high as I’ve ever seen it and that just means there is no room for water saturation into the ground,” he said.

“We’re worried about it and it’s just for the fact if we get a lot of heavy rain fall, that rains got to make its way through the system, and yeah, we could have this happen again.”

He said crews are on stand-by watching and are ready to react if they get a call.

While Kent said he wants dryer weather, it does not necessarily mean warmer weather. High temperatures increase the risk of forest fire, another issue that can wreak havoc on Northern Saskatchewan.

“If we don’t get flooding we get forest fires so it’s kind of darned if you do darned if you don’t situation,” Kent said.

“With this high water table it’s keeping all of us in the emergency preparedness field really busy and we’ve been kind of worked off our feet right from the spring.”

Things have been going well when it comes to evacuations. There have been no serious injuries or deaths resulting from emergency situations this year.

“Communities are happy with the way things happened, we managed to get them out before the road flooded, we’ve managed to get people out during the forest fire.”

The northern communities have been working together. He said all the PAGC chiefs know each other and have been offering help in any way possible.

“It was really great to see all the different chiefs calling me and offering up their services,” he said, adding the communities are very grateful.

klavoie@panow.com