Baie-St-Paul Catastrophy

Baie-St-Paul+Catastrophy

Victor Parent, Journalist,Graphic artist

On May 8th, Baie Saint-Paul received a huge amount of rain within 24 hours and the repercussions were catastrophic including two volunteer firefighters that lost their lives.

In 24 hours, 1st of May, up to 65 mm of water rained on the city which is ”very significant” according to André Cantin. The flooding of the rivers in the region provoked a lot of floods and isolated nearly one thousand residents and made two victims.

Unfortunately, two men succumbed in the river, they were both volunteer firefighters trying to help the people of Baie-st-Paul. They were named Christopher Lavoie and Régis Lavoie, 23 and 55 years old. The corpse of Régis Lavoie was found and difficultly extract first from the river and taken away by a helicopter to emergency services. After was Christopher’s corpse, found a few hours later 500 m away from the first corpse. Although the names of the two victims were the same, they are not related to each other.

The floods led to much damage but there was one that was worse than the other and that is the flooding of the camping, the Genévrier. The place was damaged by the overflow of the river ”du Gouffre”At around 9 o’clock, it started to swell and at 11 o’clock, the camping was all affected by water. Many trailers went with the flow of the river,” Between 15 to 20 trailers passed at the front of my house” explained Paul Labbé, co-owner of the camping. Hopefully, nobody was in the caravans because the camping was closed at this time of the year.