Photo : Bruno Bergeron
As the mid-February snowstorms melted one month later, Cookshire breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Eaton River started to recede, as if Saint Patrick and the luck of the Irish were gracing the town.
Firefighters were on standby from midnight to 8 a.m. Sunday morning, March 16, before that bit of weather relief came in on the nonetheless heavy winds. The river never broke its bank, although at one point it was close.
Flooding occurred elsewhere in the region, with the Salmon River crossing the road in Weedon, for example, but without significant incident.
It was the winter winds, more than snowfall and flooding, that marked the 2025 calendar in Cookshire-Eaton.
“Everyone was in over their heads,” said the municipality’s former public works manager, now special projects manager, René Lavigne. “The worst was in the night from Monday to Tuesday [February 17-18]” due to the wind. “On some roads, there was four feet of snow right across.”
Private subcontractors had to be brought in with snowblowers and loaders to help with the clearing effort.
In one case, two cars were stuck and abandoned side by side, blocking the road from snow removal. Municipal employees had to find the owners and have them come and move their cars so the road could be cleared before the morning commute.
Cookshire-Eaton covers the largest territory within the regional county municipality (MRC) of the Upper Saint Francis region (MRC du Haut-Saint-François). The municipality has over 260 kilometres of roads to clear and de-ice in bad weather.
Lavigne said the toughest challenge is when the storms or freezing rains start around 4 a.m., leaving the municipality just a couple of hours to make roads passable for people starting their day or for emergency vehicles to get access where needed.
During this winter’s back-to-back storms in mid-February all town snow-clearing employees and its 10 trucks were on duty non-stop, with another 12 or so reinforcements added.
But by 7 a.m., Tuesday, February 18, the roads were passable, Lavigne said. “It was a good one, but I’ve seen worse,” he added.
Neither the snowstorms nor the near flooding broke the municipality’s budget, town manager Martin Tremblay said in an interview last week, a day after Saint Patrick’s. “So far, we’re okay.” The forecast from then on looked good, but these days one never knows. The winds, particularly those aggressive ones from the south, seem to change on a whim.
Tremblay said the municipality was particularly grateful to its employees after they tackled the two winter storms. Messages of thanks were expressed in the aftermath, in person, on social media, and will continue during Cookshire-Eaton’s two days of employee recognition annually.
“We wanted the population to know that our men and women did a good job. Because that was exceptional work.”
