Thirty years after the Saguenay flood forced her to flee her home with her three young children, France Roy says the memories are still vivid.
“It’s a memory that’s still engraved in my mind,” Roy said Monday from her home in Chicoutimi. “When I think about it 30 years later, it still makes me sad.”
She was living in the rural sector of La Baie, near the Rivière-à-Mars, when torrential rain between July 19 and 21, 1996, triggered one of Quebec’s worst natural disasters.
She’s among the 14,000 who were displaced from their homes in eastern Quebec’s Saguenay region. More than 155 millimetres of rain fell in some areas in just 24 hours, turning rivers into destructive torrents that swept away homes, roads and bridges.
“I saw the river starting to come into our driveway,” Roy recalled. “The water was so loud, the river made so much noise.”
Roy said her sister rushed to warn her that the river was about to overflow. Alone with her three children, at the time all under the age of seven, she watched the water rise until a neighbour helped them escape in his camper van.
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“We had to leave using old trails because the roads were flooded,” she said. “It was terrifying.”
By the time the floodwaters receded, about four feet of water had filled her basement. The family spent three weeks away from home before they were able to return.
Ten people were killed during the flood. Hundreds of houses were destroyed, roads and bridges were washed away, and several communities were temporarily cut off from the rest of the province.
The Canadian Red Cross said 18,000 people ultimately received assistance following the disaster. The total economic cost was later estimated at nearly $1 billion and led to years of reconstruction, including new reservoirs, upgraded dams and other flood-control measures.
For Roy, however, the lasting impact has been emotional.
“The stress it caused … it really affected me,” she said. “For many years, whenever I saw flooding on the news, I would cry.”
She still remembers watching houses being swept away and uprooted trees carried downstream.
“It was like a horror movie,” she said. “Seeing rooftops floating, seeing those huge tree trunks in the Saguenay River … it really disturbed me.”
One image from the disaster has since become a symbol of the region’s resilience: a little white house in Chicoutimi, which survived despite being surrounded by raging floodwaters. The home was later preserved as a museum commemorating the flood.
Roy said visiting the museum years later reminded her not only of the destruction, but also of the solidarity that emerged across the region.
“People helped each other,” she said. “That’s what stayed with me.”
© 2026 The Canadian Press