Weeks after storm flooded storage, McEwen apartment building residents deal with damage in extreme heat

On July 1, a storm submerged the basement of 30 McEwen underwater. Now, residents deal with the fallout amidst an extreme heat warning from Environment Canada.

On a day like July 14, when the heat in Ottawa was so severe that Environment Canada issued a “yellow warning”, Jane Boucher should have been cooling off in the pool behind her apartment on 30 McEwen Ave . Instead, she was parked in the lot, blasting cool air in the car for her and her 17-year-old dog, Daisy, taking a break from the “excruciating” heat in her home. She’s not living in the building right now; she was only there to check on it.

After seeing friends on Canada Day, Boucher and her husband, Dave Dellepalme, returned to find a home without power and a storage locker that had been submerged in water. On July 1, the Park West apartment building at 30 McEwen lost electricity and elevator service, and the basement of its storage room was flooded, along with thousands of other basements around the city . Since then, Boucher and Dellepalme said they’ve been lucky enough to stay with friends in Findlay Creek, only returning to take pictures of the damage.

“It worries me to stay here with no fire system. We live on the 25th floor. If something were to happen, none of the alarms work yet, so I don’t feel comfortable staying on the 25th floor with no fire system,” said Boucher.

But she said her 86-year-old mother, who also lives in the building, has suffered the most from the storm’s fallout. Boucher’s sister has temporarily taken her mother in at her home. “She had a PSW that came in six mornings a week.

But she has no home care at my sister’s. And she’s in the hospital right now — she fell this morning. It’s one thing after another,” said Boucher.

Family photos submerged Another one of these things, Boucher said, is the loss of belongings. She threw out everything in her two freezers and fridge, which she estimates included about $800 worth of meat. “We’re lucky because we’re on the top floor and have two balconies, so I went in and aired it out a little bit for five minutes, but we couldn’t stay any longer than five minutes.

It’s just too hot,” Boucher said. The couple said that aside from the loss of electricity, everything in their basement storage locker was underwater. “I had a big bin of all my family’s and children’s pictures.

I know it wasn’t a tightly sealed lid. Submerged in 10 feet of water? All those pictures are gone,” said Boucher.

In storage, she said they also kept a Christmas tree, decorations and Dellepalme’s hunting clothes and gear. The residents were told they could wash and disinfect their belongings from the basement, but Boucher isn’t interested. “I told them, ‘Once I take pictures, you guys can throw it all away,’ because it was sewer and flood water .

I’m not even going to touch it down there,” she said. A daunting task Despite the extreme heat, other residents took it upon themselves to empty their storage lockers. On the sticky afternoon, about a dozen of them were busy tending to their belongings.

Some threw rusted tires in garbage bags, wiping foreheads with sweat. Others in masks and gloves carried plastic bins filled with smelly, dripping objects across the parking lot to garbage bins. This was the case for Teresa Ribeiro, who said she didn’t have time to wait out the heat.

“It’s a daunting task,” said Ribeiro. “Every minute counts.” Ribeiro, who lives on the fourth floor, said only residents up to the second floor were affected by water damage inside their units.

Though electricity is back, she said elevators to the basement still don’t work, so residents have to use the stairs to retrieve or dispose of belongings in storage. “Nothing can be salvaged,” she said, leaving for another load. Nothing new For others at 30 McEwen, July 1 didn’t have quite the same impact.

Jane Ogden said she routinely prepares herself for this sort of thing. “Power goes out quite frequently in this area, and power outages in this building are nothing new to me,” said Ogden. The 16th-floor resident also had to dispose of everything in her storage locker, fridge and freezer, but she said the biggest loss was an electric mobility scooter — even though she doesn’t use it that much.

“That’s what we have insurance for,” she said with a laugh. Ogden said that for her, the extreme heat hasn’t been too extreme. “I have fans.

I only live in a bachelor, so my place is not that big,” she said. Ogden was pleased about how upfront the building’s owner was about the situation, emailing frequent updates on the repairs. “We have full power and about two elevators working,” Ogden said, adding that in the most recent update, residents were told that hot water would also soon be restored to the whole building, as currently floors one to eight can only take cold showers.

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