‘We bailed for about four hours,’ says Regina business owner after basement flood

The Broom Closet in Regina’s Core neighbourhood is back open for business, but the cleanup continues a day after heavy rain caused a basement flood.

On Friday, a rainstorm submerged roads and underpasses. That morning, it sent water pouring into the basement of the building that houses Donna Kruger’s business, along with Jessup’s General Store, on Quebec Street near 11th Avenue.

Kruger says the water was up to her ankles. She scrambled to call her insurance company and her landlord. Then, she started to bail water.

“We bailed for about four hours and finally the water abated naturally. But we still had … probably another 100 gallons that needed to be bailed out, even after the natural drainage,” Kruger says.

At the moment, Kruger was focused on the cleanup.

“No crying until I went home,” she says.

“I mean, you do what you have to do and you work as hard as you can because you have to protect everything that’s in here, as well as the property.”

As far as she can tell, the damage wasn’t too extensive. The main floor was unscathed. When the adjuster came, “we were really fortunate that the moisture meter only showed about four inches up the walls.” However, an adjuster for the property owner still has to assess the building as well.

Like many others, Kruger was not surprised to see heavy rain causing problems in the city. She says underpass flooding was a “regular occurrence” while growing up and hopes the city learns something from this latest incident.

“Our infrastructure is really insufficient for those kinds of things. I know it doesn’t happen as much as it used to but it still happens too frequently,” she says.

“Put more of our funding into infrastructure, as far as sewer systems and things like that go … Let’s be a little more proactive about it.”

Kruger has never experienced basement flooding before.

“I’m a little P-O’ed,” she says. “You can’t cry about spilled milk, right? I’m annoyed that it happened and it’s inconvenient that it happened. And you know, that’s really what it is more than anything else. It’s a huge inconvenience.”