Flash flooding in Nova Scotia leaves teen dead, roads submerged

Heavy rain in Nova Scotia Thursday caused flash flooding that left a teen dead, submerged roads and destroyed at least one bridge a year after similar flooding killed four people and caused widespread damage.

RCMP said they received a call around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday about a young person who was pulled into a water-filled ditch at a park in Wolfville, about 100 kilometres northwest of Halifax, and disappeared under the rushing water. The victim was playing with friends when the flash flooding began, police said.

The youth’s body was found around 11:30 p.m. on Thursday after the water drainage system in the area was diverted during search efforts. The Mounties, the local fire department and members of three search and rescue teams were involved in the search.

“This is a devastating day for our province,” Premier Tim Houston said in a news conference on Friday. “To the parents and to the family, on behalf of myself and all Nova Scotia, our sincerest condolences for the loss of your child.”

The flooding, which hit Thursday night as more than 100 millimetres of rain fell in just a few hours, happened nearly a year after devastating flooding killed four people and left highways, bridges and homes across a wide area in ruin. The deaths last year prompted calls to change how the province issues emergency alerts and to bring cellphone service to areas with no little or no coverage.

Janet Cooper, who was in command for West Hants Ground Search and Rescue teams, said between 50 to 60 searchers were on scene during the dark hours of the rainy evening. She said calls came in to the group around 8:30 p.m. and her team got to work soon thereafter. The first to arrive on the scene were searchers from the town of Valley, she explained, as they are the primary group covering that area.

“All the search teams here in this province work together, and we often assist each other, so we were on scene,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview.

“That amount of rain and water, plus the fact that it was dark at this point in the night significantly impacted our approach to the search,” she said.

In a post made to Facebook, Annapolis MLA Carman Kerr identified the deceased youth as a male teen. Police did not release his name.

Wendy Donovan, the mayor of Wolfville, said the rain came as tides were rising, which caused major flooding in parts of the town. “It’s the impact of climate change … and there is going to need to be a government response,” she said in an interview.

“There is also going to need to be an individual response because no matter how high you build your dikes or how big you make your storm sewers, if the water can’t escape, this is going to happen.”

Environment Canada had issued weather warnings Thursday for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as the region braced for the remnants of hurricane Beryl, which made landfall in Texas on Monday and has been blamed for at least nine deaths in the United States and 11 in the Caribbean.

The province issued an emergency alert to mobile phones around 8:30 p.m. Thursday, about an hour after the teen was swept away.

Audio recordings obtained by The Globe and Mail of emergency radio broadcasts in Kings County, where Wolfville is located, show that emergency crews in the area were responding to calls related to the heavy rain and flooding for nearly three hours before the emergency alert went out. The audio recordings were posted by Broadcastify, a website that streams and archives public emergency radio frequencies.

Calls related to the rain and flooding began around 5:40 p.m. For the next several hours, crews responded to an increasing volume of calls related to washed-out roads, flooded basements, downed power lines and residents in need of evacuation from their homes.

At around 7:40 p.m., a dispatcher reported the missing youth: “Caller said he was playing with his friend and his friend had gotten washed away.” Emergency crews were sent to the scene for a water rescue.

Other calls made that night included a man caught in a tree after escaping floodwater while he was out fishing and another incident in which a family with a young child were trapped in their home surrounded by water with no way to escape.

When asked about the timing of the alerts and why they were not issued earlier, a spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Emergency Management Office (EMO), which is responsible for issuing alerts including those related to severe weather, did not respond in time for publication.

Corporal Carlie McCann with the RCMP said the force only has the authority to issue civil alerts related to human behaviour, not weather.

Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, said this week’s storm in Nova Scotia will be a test of whether provincial officials learned from last year’s floods.

”The lessons that should’ve been learned is that alert warnings need to go out in a very timely fashion,” he said.

”Fundamentally what went wrong last time is that direction for shelter in place was not issued fast enough.”

With reports from Mariya Postelnyak and The Canadian Press