BRANDON, Man. — Alf Archambault was supposed to start a new job at a bank Monday.
Instead, he spent the day with his wife and three children packing up many of their belongings and high-tailing it to higher ground.
“The police came and knocked on the door and said the evacuation was actually happening,” Archambault said as he loaded boxes into his father’s truck.
“We just kind of moved everything up to high ground as much as we can.”
The 29-year-old was one of thousands of people who were told to leave low-lying areas of Manitoba’s second-largest city as the Assiniboine River continued to swell.
City spokesman Brain Kayes says 368 homes and businesses are under a mandatory evacuation order and another 500 are on evacuation alert.
They were told to register as evacuees and find places to stay with relatives or friends. Police went door-to-door and attached yellow tape to homes that have been evacuated.
About one kilometre west of Archambault’s modest two-storey house, Curtis Spence was scrambling to find a temporary home for himself, his girlfriend and their three kids. They moved into the area only a month ago from Portage la Prairie, Man.
“I have to make a lot of phone calls today,” Spence said. “I need somewhere for my kids to sleep.”
While neighbourhoods were still dry Monday, the Assiniboine was approaching the top of super-sandbag dikes protecting some low-lying areas, including 18th Street, a key north-south.
Crews in small front-end loaders were loading more earth into the giant bags and stacking them higher on the edge of the roadway. Nearby restaurants, car dealerships and other businesses stacked sandbags against doorways just in case major dikes gave way.
The Assiniboine has already passed its all-time high in Brandon that was set during the flood of 1923. Provincial flood forecasters have said that between 20 and 50 millimetres of rain is expected in southern Manitoba over the next few days.
Manitoba quickly updated its flood forecast for the Assiniboine late last week after discovering inaccurate flow data was coming from a malfunctioning gauge on the Qu’Appelle River in Saskatchewan, a tributary of the Assiniboine.
Flooding across Manitoba this year has swamped farmland and closed hundreds of roads. People were also forced from a handful of aboriginal reserves when water cut off road access.
On Sunday, the military was called in to help shore up dikes on the Assiniboine River between Portage la Prairie and Headingley, which is just west of Winnipeg.
Most of the troops were already in the province stationed at Canadian Forces Base Shilo. They stood in the mud in long, snaking lines and tossed sandbags to each other.
Premier Greg Selinger, who travelled to Portage on Monday, said the military had 2.7 million sandbags at their disposal.
“They want addition protection in some of the low spots. They want to re-enforce the dikes wherever there is an exposure,” Selinger said. “Whatever the issue is, the Armed Forces can move in quickly and deal with it.”
The army is also better prepared to deal with the dangers of working around flood water, Selinger said. Emergency officials had to pull a man from his truck early Sunday after he got stuck in fast-moving water that was flowing over a closed stretch of road north of Brandon. He was not hurt.
“Under these conditions, it can be quite dangerous,” the premier said. “You need people that are trained and you need the backup support in case anything happens.”