Streets, basements and businesses were flooded after a torrential rainstorm hammered the southern Manitoba city of Steinbach on Thursday night.
Vehicles were left stranded in sudden lakes as the city was hit with 103 millimetres of rain in just four hours and 135 mm by the time it stopped, according to Environment Canada.
That’s the equivalent of two months’ worth of rain for that city, 40 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg.
La Broquerie (10 km east of Steinbach) and Niverville (20 km south of Winnipeg) also reported well over 100 mm.
“It was pouring like you can’t believe,” said Steinbach Coun. Bill Hiebert. “I had a call at 3 a.m. from a resident saying he had three feet of water in his basement.”
It was worse for the Steinbach and Area Animal Rescue building, which took in almost two metres of water, vice-president Graham Pollock said.
“We’re in the process right now of just contacting all of our fosters to see who’s open to take some of our cats that we’ve got in the building. We’ve got 22 cats and kittens in the building right now, so we’re in the process of moving them out,” he said Friday morning.
“Then we can we can start doing what we need to do in terms of pumping and getting the water out of the basement.”
The upper level of the building is where the animals are kept, but the lower level is where all the cat and dog food is stored, along with kitty litter and kennels.
It just so happened to also be chock full of items for a fundraising yard sale planned for this weekend.
“And it’s all floating around right now. So I don’t know, it’s pretty bad,” said Pollock, noting the agency’s boardroom is also in the lower level.
The property backs onto a creek that took in a lot of the rain and then swelled, overflowing its banks and flowing into the animal rescue building through the basement window wells, he said.
“Our insurance covers overland flooding, but we’re a not-for-profit organization and … our deductible for our insurance is $25,000. This is a hit that that we obviously could ill afford to have happen.”
Environment Canada meteorologist Chris Stammers said a line of thunderstorms formed just south of Winnipeg late Thursday night, creating a narrow swath of heavy rainfall across a west-to-east line.
“We had what’s called training thunderstorms, so kind of a line that continuously hits the same area,” he said.
Steinbach was hardest hit. Sprague in the southeast corner had 84 mm, Marchand had 58 mm, Sanford had 39 mm, St-Pierre-Jolys had 33 mm and Zhoda had 25 mm.
“Quite variable over short distances,” Stammers said. “It’s a very humid air mass for this time of the year, and that can produce the very heavy rainfall that we’re seeing. It’s certainly not a fall-like pattern that we’re [typically] in.”
The temperature increased through the evening in Steinbach, reaching 18 C at 11 p.m., when the downpour began.
The storm hit almost a year after the last major flooding in the city, on Sept. 16-17, 2024. That storm dropped 156 mm of rain.
“We didn’t expect this kind of rain again,” said Hiebert.
The city is in the process of increasing capacity its sewer system because the current one can’t keep up with so much rain in so short a span of time, he said.
The streets were cleared a couple of hours after the rain stopped and the system caught up, Hiebert said.
He personally added a sump pump to his own home after last year’s flooding. It didn’t prevent all water from coming in, but certainly limited it, he said.
“I’ll have to do some drying, but I won’t have the $25,000 damage I had last year.”
Tayler Friesen, who lives in La Broquerie, said the flooding has left her trapped in her home. The water was almost knee deep in front of her house and close to waist deep at the corner of her street, she said.
It stayed out of Friesen’s basement, but “I know there’s people at the corner of our road, they are not OK, that’s for sure,” she said.
The rain suddenly started cascading in a deluge around 11 p.m., and within an hour, the ditches around her neighbourhood were full.
“Today’s garbage day. We were watching garbage just float down the ditch,” she said. “I was supposed to work tonight, but I don’t think I’m making it. I would definitely say I’m stranded.”
In Niverville, an estimated 125 mm of rain fell, but by the time the sun came up Friday, there was little evidence of it, said Mayor Myron Dyck.
The majority of the neighbourhoods in Niverville, one of the province’s fastest-growing communities, have been built since 2005 and have modern drainage and retention ponds to hold back stormwater.
“We don’t have the same older development that maybe other communities would have. We’re as prepared as we can be,” Dyck said.
Even so, when you get that much rain in that short period of time, the water inevitably collects and spreads out for at least a little while, he said.
“I mean, the town of Niverville has essentially zero slope,” Dyck said. “[The flooding] was predominantly overland, coming through window wells or up the driveway and into basements that way.”
The town’s public works department was ready for emergencies overnight, but “they’ve assured me that as far as our sewer system is concerned, and our lift station, that we are operating at normal,” Dyck said.
“So it’s now just dealing with runoff through ditches and things like that.”
