Thanks everyone for helping out, the sandbagging is complete in our neighbourhood, for now. If you want to join the roving bands of sandbaggers (a bunch of them showed up in an OC Transpo shuttle bus), check out the city web site or ask around (councillor Jeff Leiper’s staff would know).
Flood info page at: https://ottawa.ca/en/residents/emergency-services/emergency-preparedness/flood-information-0 There’s even a video there about making sandbag walls.
In case you missed it, most of the action was from 4pm to 6pm – fast work. We started with mostly local people bagging a pile of sand freshly dropped off by the city.


A city crew was there down the street trying to block off an old sanitary drain that leads to the abandoned neighbourhood in the woods (you may have noticed a 1934 manhole in the woods where Pontiac street used to run). Of course, with the woods full of water, that would cause problems.

A little after 5pm an OC Transpo shuttle bus arrived, possibly with volunteers who had been at Britannia (at least that’s what I think the bus driver said). Anyway, someone did a good job coordinating OC Transpo and the volunteers.


And an hour and a fraction later, it was all done.

– Alex