Flood Road For Rosenort?

There is talk of building a flood road for the village of Rosenort. RM of Morris Reeve Ralph Groening says whenever there is significant spring flooding, it has a major disruption on local businesses. Reeve Groening says one of the ideas is to turn the road heading north out of Rosenort into a flood road.

"The detail of that is yet to be determined," says the Reeve. "We've not done any engineering studies on that but we have looked at the surveys, we've looked at the elevations. We believe that it's the most reasonable from an elevation standpoint of view to upgrade and to provide the potential for access out of the community in the event of a repeat of 1997 event."

Reeve Groening says the stretch of road they're considering is about seven miles long and a good chunk of that is dirt. He adds during a significant flood event, the road has water running overtop. "We would need to upgrade that to an all weather gravel road. I don't believe we're looking at a paved road, not for the moment. But we're looking at what the cost would be to upgrade, to build it up with gravel, what kind of culverts would be required. There's a lot of work involved, not the least of it would be to work together with the RM of Mcdonald to complete the north end of that access road."

"It would have to be the kind of road that would be able to handle all types of traffic," explains Reeve Toews. "Our major concern is that business in the community be able to continue to operate during a flood event."

He says the topic is worthy of more discussion. "I think it's something that should be presented to the province of Manitoba to get their opinion and their advice on the feasibility of it and yes hopefully would be something that we could move ahead with it and provide that extra level of protection to guarantee that the community would not be disrupted by a major flood event."