April rain on track to beat Montreal records: Environment Canada

Source: Montreal Gazette.

Seasoned plumber Howard Cohen spoke in hurried sentences over the phone on Friday, taking a few minutes out of another busy day filled with panicked calls about flooded basements, overflowing drains and struggling sump pumps.

“It’s been crazy, insane,” said Cohen, co-owner of Monsieur Drain, a St-Laurent based business that’s dispatched plumbers and vacuum trucks to Île-Bizard, Laval, Rigaud and other very wet places in recent days. “It’s been 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

From homeowners waking up to water in their basements to warehouses having their loading docks fill up with two metres of water, Cohen said, “everyone is flooding.”

And though this time of the year is always busy, Cohen added, in his 29 years working as a plumber, he can’t remember an April quite as hectic as the last three weeks have been.

According to Environment Canada, April 2017 is on track to becoming the rainiest in Montreal’s history.

“We’ll either break the record or be really close,” said Environment Canada meteorologist Marie-Ève Giguère.

The city has already been soaked with 135 millimetres of rain this month, which is only 30 millimetres shy of a record set in 2005 and already twice as much as the usual average for the month of April.

Montreal has also received more rain in the first four months of 2017 than it has in the first four months of any other year since 1872 (Environment Canada’s earliest documented year), eclipsing a record that had stood since 1936. The record amount is mostly a result of a much milder January and February than usual, Giguère said.