Flooding

I've spent most of the day glued to the CBC news channel(while I stitched).  the area where they breached the dike is familiar to us as the strawberry farm we patronize is right on the curve they are calling Hoop and Hollar ( isn't the word actually whoop?)  They actually interviewed the owner of the farm.  it's a huge operation--one of the top four income-producers in the area, and he said that it may take him 6 years to get backinto full production.  He was going around taking pictures of the farm so he could prove what it had looked like "before". He is the one who had just spent $40,000.00 bringing in migrant workers from Mexico--who are now working as sandbaggers. (Quite a visual image of Mexicans, Hutterites, and solders working side by side.) They are spending so much time talking about this deliberate dike breach but just giving passing mention to the problems between Prtage and Lake Manitoba.  The situation around the lake is much, much more critical as the area is more used for pasture land, and they are desperately trying to move thousands of cattle, horses, pigs and chickens.  The call has gone out all over western Canada for anyone willing to provide pasture for the livestock.  The cost of trucking them out is horrendous,but then, so is the cost of trying to provide them with feed, as there won't be any grown around here this year.  They are estimateing two to three years before most of them can think about getting back into production.

The  water is moving slowly, and I don't think we need to worry about Cathy for the weekend.  The faint hope is that the water will flow into the Elm and La Salle rivers and flow into the Red within those channels. There is a chance, however small, that NO homes will be flooded.  Not likely though.  It was interesting to watch them cutting channels through the one mile section roads to direct the water away from homes and into farm land.  They're using the section roads like small water control "cells". Of course, most of the roads in the area are closed, and there is a strong RCMP presence, to protect the homes and farms where people have been evacutated.  I wonder if you couldn't get the news channels websites on the internet, Beth?  It is interesting and quite a learning experience, if you can get beyond the human cost.