Diking accident injures 5 in Souris

Five soldiers and a civilian were injured Monday when a hydraulic hose blew on a dump truck hauling sandbags for flood fighting in Souris, Man.

The six, who were resting at the nearby Plum Creek site when they were sprayed with the oily fluid, were taken to hospital in Brandon for treatment, said Lori Truscott, spokeswoman for Canadian Forces Base Shilo. Their condition is unknown.

Despite the accident, Souris Mayor Darryl Jackson said Monday he's confident the barriers in the town of 2,000 are ready.

Chief floodfighter Steve Topping said the weather forecast is fairly good because there has been minimal rain in the Souris basin. He said they've been advising municipalities along the Souris they are expecting a crest about half a metre lower than had been predicted.

Residents in the town, about 50 kilometres southwest of Brandon, have spent weeks slinging sandbags since provincial flood officials urged them to build up their protection in light of the devastation in Minot, N.D.

Part of the American city, which is also situated along the Souris, was swallowed by the floodwaters last week. The water reached levels not seen in 130 years, washed over dikes and submerged more than 4,000 homes.

Farther upstream in Saskatchewan, where the Souris begins, much of the village of Roche Percee was also inundated.

Hundreds of soldiers arrived in Souris over the weekend to help build dikes. On Sunday, the town decided to sacrifice a historic 177-metre-long footbridge — Canada's longest — to prevent it from ripping apart a protective dike.

Jackson said the anchors holding the bridge cables ran beneath a dike, and if the Souris River rose up over the bridge, the cables could tear out the anchors, making the structural failure of the dike inevitable.

The river's crest is expected to arrive some time between Tuesday and Friday.

Jordan Greig, a 17-year-old sandbag volunteer, said he's looking forward to the end of the crisis when he won't be awakened by a morning siren. The town of about 1,600 people has been regularly issuing emergency calls for volunteers by four siren bursts.

Elsewhere, the town of Melita, located in the southwest corner of Manitoba — and the first community that was bracing for the Souris crest — seems to have made it through unscathed.

Mayor Bob Walker believes the peak may have passed through the town already. The crest was about 0.6 metres higher than their spring peak of 4.4 metres.

On Monday, that level in the town, which is on a higher elevation than Souris, had dropped a few centimetres.

Based on the information he is getting from North Dakota, Walker said he believes the water level will continue to drop very slowly. The information he has received from the U.S. officials has been fairly accurate, he said.

"It's only 27 miles away and there's not a whole bunch of calculation in between, whereas when the province tries to come up with numbers they're feeding in information right back to Rafferty and Alameda."

The Rafferty-Alameda reservoir and dam structure in Saskatchewan controls levels on the Souris River.

Walker said the level in Melita was lower than Manitoba officials had told him to expect.

But there is a dike in North Dakota that he believes is holding back another 0.3 metres of water that could still be on the way.