We’re wading through water again this week for our look at Timmins history, and the floods our community has endured.
Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann reminds us that Hollinger Park was once Miller Lake. “And Miller Lake would flood periodically and flood areas of the downtown,” she recounts.
The biggest floods have been further west, along the Mattagami River.
“We still see it now,” says Bachmann. “Last one was in 1996, it was a really large flood.”
The water went so high, there were fears the Mattagami bridge would float away. Luckily, the bridge on Lafleur Drive had opened the previous fall, almost a year earlier than expected.
And 36 years before that: “Back in 1960 there was a very large flood of the river,” Bachmann notes. “It took out the Wicks mill that was on the river; damaged it so badly that they never reopened that mill.”
