Achi news desk-
May 17, 1974 started out like any other sunny spring day, but quickly turned into a day of disaster.
“I was in high school at the time and my boss came to pick me up and told me to help get things out of the basement of the business because there must have been a flood,” said Cambridge resident Ross Light. “So I jumped on my motorcycle and went to the store and started working downstairs. I got a call from the top of the stairs: ‘Ross, get out of the basement, the water is crossing the street.’ So I went upstairs, got on my motorcycle quickly and went to higher ground.”
Light, who was 17 at the time, shared his story at Cambridge’s Hall of Fire Museum on Saturday, where community members gathered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Great Flood of ’74.
No one died and no one was seriously injured, but the impact devastated the community.
“For those people who know Cambridge well, Water Street right by the river, it was completely underwater,” said museum volunteer Tom Ritz.
“It took quite a while for things to get back to some sense of normalcy because of all the mud and debris,” Light said. “My father had an office right on Water Street and all the files were soaked and stretched. It was terrible.”
The flooding was caused by weeks of wet weather and a spring thaw. It is still considered one of the largest floods ever recorded in the Grand River watershed.
“We got out of school,” said museum board chairman Rob Bryson. “I came here to see what the fuss was about. It brings up all kinds of memories and stories, phenomenal stories about what happened that day.”
Throughout the downtown core on Saturday, blue markers were displayed on storefronts and on several streets, indicating the high water lines from that fateful day.
While some believe it was a rare occurrence, others fear the city could see something like this happen again.
“It’s a very rare event, but you know, in terms of climate change, maybe it’s a potential future problem,” Bryson said.
“You can never say never, but there were a great many procedures and things put in place to reduce, if not stop, a major flood of this type,” Reitz added.
For the 50th anniversary of the flood, the City of Cambridge and the Grand River Conservation Authority updated their emergency plans in February.
“The river looks very different than it did in 1974,” Reitz said. “There are some concrete grains, dirt walls.”
“There was a huge engineering study and they made a correction of the river and then they built granaries on both sides of the river,” Bryson explained. “They dug the river to deepen it so that there would be less possibility of the water spreading to downtown Galt. There was a lot of damage in the heart of Galt about 50 years ago, so their hope was to change that, and it happened.”
Now Bryson hopes to keep the memory of the event alive by assembling a historical collection of the Great Flood of ’74 that will be given to the Cambridge City Archives
“So one of the things we’re doing is filming the presentation of two engineers who were involved in restoring the river and then all this information that we’re collecting from people. We’ve asked people to give their stories as well. Then you take YouTube and all this information that we’re collecting and we’re going to give [it] to the archive because we just found out it’s a generational thing. The generations go on and the stories go on and we want to capture that.”
