Last week’s transfer of Flintstone Park into the ownership of city hall got Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann thinking about historic floods in the city.
We’re not likely to see flooding in the area of the park anymore, because of upgrades to how Town Creek flows beside it. But Bachmann notes one particularly tragic flood right there in August, 1961.
“A woman and her four children drowned in the basement of their home, because the water came up so quickly and that was because of rain,” she recounts. “Over six inches of rain in a 12-hour period and then it just continued to rain more and more and more. It took out a lot of the road in that area. It flooded everybody’s basements. It caused thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of damage.”
In the weeks to come, we’ll remember more local floods – and they’re not all blamed on the Mattagami River.