Île Bizard residents gather to demand provincial support to build dikes

Residents are gathering outside Île Bizard city hall Tuesday evening to demand provincial support for building dikes to protect against flooding on the island.

In order to guard their homes from another springtime flood, the group is calling for more preventive measures.

"We're two years after the first flooding. Nothing has been done in terms of concrete measures on the ground," said Simon Authier, spokesperson for Île Bizard flood victims.

His house was badly flooded in 2017 and 2019, with eight feet of water filling his basement. 

"It's really something that can be prevented, and of course long-term measures can be done but they're expensive and that's one of the challenges the city is facing," he said. 

Authier's group has three requests:

• For the provincial Environment Ministry to allow the city to build a permanent dike in the Prairies River to prevent future flooding. They also want a temporary dike on Île Bizard in the zero- to 20-year flood zone. Although there is already a dike along the river, Authier says it isn't high enough to withstand floodwater. 

• For the provincial and federal governments to provide funding to build these dikes.

• For municipal and provincial governments to move faster to address the problem of severe flooding. 

Authier says the long-term solutions that require engineering analysis, environmental soil tests and other processes are necessary, but the government needs to address the problem in the short term as well. 

One thing that could help, Authier says, is for the municipality to provide sandbags in October, instead of during spring. 

Mayor says temporary solutions a possibility

Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève borough Mayor Normand Marinacci says if the Environment Ministry is on board, temporary solutions such as providing sandbags early are a possibility. 

"But … there are eight or nine different areas of the borough that need different solutions. That's what we've been working on since the [first] flooding," Marinacci said.

He pointed out that, after the 2017 floods, the borough formed a post-mortem committee that decided to focus on the protection of homes. He says that, as a result, there were fewer flooded homes this year.