After watching the Canadian military leave en masse just as flood waters began to rise once more, residents of the still-flooded Richelieu Valley received some good news Monday when Premier Jean Charest announced 250 more soldiers would be arriving in the area shortly.
Charest said he spoke with the office of the Minister of National Defence just before arriving to tour the area Monday and that he had been assured the deployment was coming.
The new soldiers will bring the military's presence in the region up to 500, which is still short of the 800 soldiers that were present at the height of the operation.
Except high winds from the south was pushing more water out of Lake Champlain and into the Richelieu River, leading to a six-centimetre rise in water levels Monday with huge, white-capping waves crashing on to the back doors of area residents.
Water levels were feared to rise up to 20 centimetres by Tuesday.
Charest was happy the Canadian military would be sending reinforcements, but suggested it wasn't enough.
"That's good news," Charest said of the new soldiers. "But the bad news is we are now experiencing the same extremes of (water) heights we saw on the sixth of May."
Charest expressed just how unexpected this situation was back when he originally requested military assistance weeks ago, as he faced criticism he waited too long to make the request.
The premier said at the time that no one could have expected the flooding to be so significant, and now several weeks later the astonishment is that much more intense.
"This whole situation is just exceptional, we've never seen anything like it before," Charest said just after meeting with the mayor of the flooded community of Henryville, Serge Lafrance. "It goes on and on, and now the water is going up at a time we all thought the water would have been gone."
The demoralizing effect of that exceptional situation can be read on the faces of residents who appear to have lost hope, like those in Venise-en-Quebec that met Monday with CTV Montreal's Camille Ross.
The winds, gusting up to 60 km/h, were creating white cap waves that crashed into the sandbag walls residents are using to protect their homes, and in many cases the waves were winning the battle.
"We are no longer able to cry," resident Pierre Thivierge said. "I'm more worried about the others than I am for myself."
The unpredictable nature of wind means some people who have previously not dealt with an influx of water may now be threatened.
"We're expecting that this is going to affect a new section of Venise," said city administrator Claudie Rochon. "People that hadn't been affected by these waters."
Tony Finelli has a stone wall that normally separates his house from Lake Champlain, except that wall has been engulfed by the lake.
"There's big pieces of wood coming from the wind and they can bang our houses or the cabanos and destroy everything," Finelli said.
Charest said he spoke with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin on Monday and the situation is serious there as well, with 700 to 800 houses flooded for the past few weeks. It doesn't compare with the 3,000 evacuations ordered in Quebec, but Charest says that his government will begin to work with State governments bordering Lake Champlain to come up with an action plan.
"We're looking at…what both countries and the jurisdictions – Quebec, Vermont and the State of New York – need to do to understand what happened and what we need to do in the future to avoid this happening," Charest said. "So that's part of the work we're starting to focus on now."
The focus of the flood victims, however, are still firmly planted on the rising water levels, with what appears to be the endless task of sandbagging properties continuing unabated.
But there is hope on the horizon in spite of the significant rise in water levels expected by Tuesday.
"When we (get) to Wednesday we are going to drop very fast, about 20 centimetres at that moment," said civil security coordinator Yvan Leroux.
Residents can only hope that will be the beginning of the end of what has been a treacherous and water-logged month of May.
