By David F. Rooney
When Don Popplewell woke up at 5:30 am on Tuesday and looked out the window he certainly didn’t expect to find his house at 919 Farrell Road sitting in the middle of a lake.
“There was a river running right through the yard,” he said as he watched City employees at work on an adjacent property owned by Steve Platt.
“In 50 years I’ve never seen that much water in that creek.”
It turns out that debris, rocks and gravel washed down by the rain-fed torrent blocked a culvert that runs beneath Popplewell’s yard, flooding both properties and overflowing across the CPR tracks.
Popplewell called the Engineering and Public Works Department at about 6 am to report the situation, which also flooded a root cellar beneath his house. City workers arrived by 6:30 am, assessed the scene and set to work with a backhoe clearing the blockage. They were still at it around 9 am.
There has been flooding in other parts of the City, too. Farwell Park can be renamed Farwell Pond. There is also water gushing across Westside Road and some flooding on Alpine Lane East, above the Trans Canada Highway.
