Looking back 40 years on the devastating flood in Field

Denis Larocque walks down an empty street in Field, which in his mind, is still lined with homes and businesses.

He points to where the barber shop used to stand, where the Caisse Populaire was before it and dozens of homes were moved to higher ground. 

"It was a beautiful little town, let's put it this way, at one time," the 71-year-old says. 

"Lot of people just moved out of here and never looked back."

The watershed moment was the flood of 1979, when the Sturgeon River swelled and hundreds were forced out of their homes.

Larocque was the town's fire chief back then and remembers driving a boat down the aisles of a local grocery store to salvage food to feed evacuees, as well as rescuing one family from the roof of their home.

"One thing we were really fortunate was we never lost a life. We nearly lost some, it was a close call, but after that it was really good," he says.

Field had major flooding in 1928 and again in the 1950s, but Larocque says the town was caught off guard in the spring of 1979 when sometimes the river would rise by as much as a foot overnight.

"Everybody was really surprised, they knew it was going to rise, but to that point? Nobody knew," he says. 

Larocque says several hundred people were housed in the town's elementary school, which has since closed, and community volunteers worked for hours cooking meals.

The Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Catholic church, although built very close to the river, was one of the few buildings not to totally flood. Larocque remembers sitting on the steps with other firefighters, looking out at the water. 

"There was hopes every day of seeing the water subside," he says.

Larocque's home was up on higher ground and others thought he would never flood, but he ended up with three feet of water in his living room.

After the flood, his and dozens of other houses were moved to higher ground and a neighbourhood called Val Des Arbes, where most of the residents of Field now live.

Larocque says the provincial government paid for the move and compensated people for their property, but most took a financial loss.

Most of the businesses did not re-open and the sawmill, Field's main employer, closed for good a few years after that.

The town that was 750 people in 1979 is now less than half the size and mostly older people who decided to stay put, Larocque says with a laugh. 

"There's really good people here. They're tough. They went through lots and they're still going to go through lots," he adds. 

"When you're dealing with nature, forget it. It's a lot stronger than we are."