Manitoba is gripped in a terrible state of anxiety right now, as the provincial government assesses hour by hour when to blow a hole through the dike at the Hoop and Holller Bend southeast of Portage la Prairie, flooding 256 square kilometres of farmland and about 150 farm houses and rural homes. Everyone expects the dikes to be blown around noon today.
I was out there on Tuesday, covering the sandbagging and evacuation efforts, and I’ve still got sand all over the jacket I was wearing that day from the hour and a half I spent slinging sandbags. Just an hour and a half tired-out my muscles and my back is still aching. The local people where I was had been doing this for about 18 hours, and had days of desperate action ahead of them, so I can only imagine the feeling of exhaustion that must be hitting them now. Most of them are still there.
Here’s a cellphone pic I took from inside the sandbagging line:
I imagine there’s also a lot of dread and some despair, as people operating on zero sleep await a deliberate flooding that they can’t stop, and which may ruin their homes and will likely devastate this year’s crops. What does a farmer do to keep up his optimism when, right at seeding time, he is about to be covered by a sheet of water that is expected to be about 18 inches deep on average across his fields?
The feeling I have from being out there, and I plan to go back out there today to cover the breaching of the dike, is one of dread. It’s exactly the same feeling I used to get when I watched the evacuation scene from The Killing Fields, which still leaves my skin crawling when I watch it. That’s the best way I have of summing up the feeling in the about-to-be-flooded zone. All that the farmers and residents of this vast area about to be flooded can do now is finish up their preparations in the next couple of hours, then get out and watch the disaster unfold.
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The sense of dread out there is probably influencing the way I’m looking at the markets right now, and I’m having trouble right now separating the feeling of dread that I’ve sensed out around Portage from spilling into the anxieties I’m seeing in the world commodity and agriculture markets. There’s a lot of bad stuff happening out in the world markets right now, and the markets have been shaken by some pretty powerful tremors in the past two weeks – just overnight China once more cranked up its bank reserve requirements to try to strangle commodity demand – but with this disaster happening right here in eastern Manitoba, it’s hard to assess analytically and cold-heartedly.
