“From my point of view, this could have been avoided,” says Nicholas Holland’s son
Robie Holland doesn’t understand why his father drove down a road that was quickly filling with water as 250 millimeters of rain fell in a rural area of Nova Scotia.
“Why was the road accessible? That’s the main question I keep asking myself…. People couldn’t travel on those roads because they were flooded. “Why is it a free-for-all out in the rural areas?” he asked in an interview on Friday.
“From my point of view, this could have been avoided.”
Nicholas Holland, who was 52, was one of the four people who died in the historic flooding in the interior of Canada on July 22. The water rushed over rural Route 14 near Brooklyn, N.S., which is northwest of Halifax, and swept two cars into a hayfield.
In an interview, Robie Holland, 25, and his sister Sophie Holland, 23, said that they were thankful for the efforts of searchers that night, but that questions about how the flooding disaster was handled need to be answered by an independent investigation.
Questions include why it took so long to send a Ready Alert telling drivers to stay off the road after the deputy chief of the Brooklyn volunteer fire department asked for one at 1:22 a.m. Provincial emergency management officials sent out the alert at 3:06 a.m., about a half hour after police say the taxi Holland and three other people were in went into the water.
“If they were stuck on the highway and got a message saying, “Don’t go down to this area,” they wouldn’t have. Robie Holland said, “They’re going to change their plans.”
What happened to Hollan
Holland’s two children said that survivors told them that after their rock musician father finished a show in Windsor, N.S., early on July 22, he and his girlfriend, Michelle Stewart, headed back to their home in Brooklyn. Their car, on the other hand, got stuck in a pool of water on the highway.
The Holland siblings say that the two of them called a taxi, and the driver kept going to their house. As the cab turned a corner on Route 14, it was pulled into a hayfield by water that was moving quickly.
Robie Holland said that his father was able to break the car’s windows, which let the four people inside get out of the sinking car. He said, “He gave everyone a chance to live.”
The taxi driver’s daughter, 14-year-old Terri-Lynn Keddy, and Holland, who was not a strong swimmer, were carried away by the current. Stewart and the taxi driver were able to hold on to fixed objects that kept them from being swept away.
Hugh Morrison, a close friend of the couple, said that Stewart held on to the top of a street sign for more than an hour as the water rushed by.
Since then, people have found the dead bodies of Holland and Keddy. Colton Sisco and Natalie Harnish, both six years old, died when another car went off the road around the same time.
Robie and Sophie Holland said it makes them feel better to think about how hard their father worked to help other people and how hard the people who spent days looking for the bodies worked.
“I’m sad, but I’m thankful for them,” Sophie Holland said.
But they say they are still worried that the province and people in charge of emergency management can’t act faster in rural areas.
Robie Holland said that by 9 p.m. on the night of the torrential rain, he was being turned away by police on streets in Halifax. This made him wonder why similar roadblocks weren’t set up in the Municipality of West Hants, where his father died.
Sophie Holland, a physiotherapist, said that climate change is making things worse for her generation, and she wants governments at all levels to do more to prepare.
“(Political leaders) say, ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims,’ but if you’d done something earlier, things might have been different,” she said.
Blair Feltmate, who runs the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, is one of the people who want an independent review of Nova Scotia’s storm response to find out what went wrong. In a 2019 study that looked at how ready each province was for flooding, his center gave Nova Scotia a grade of C.
It said that the province was the only one in Atlantic Canada that gave local governments the job of mapping flood plains and that the province “does not provide incentives for the relocation of developments from flood plain zones.”
The province says it will look into it
Friday, the provincial Department of Public Works said it couldn’t give any information about roads that would be closed because of the storm. “Staff are still working hard to fix roads and bridges that were damaged by the extreme flooding,” said spokesman Gary Andrea. “Once our work is done, we’ll look at what was done over the weekend of July 21.”
Sophie and Robie Holland say they want things to get better as soon as possible.
Sophie asked, “Are we prepared?” “What are we going to change in the future? We were obviously not ready for this.”
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