'Are they stupid?'

Riverside residents of Farrell Street are staring with more dismay at the wall of sand behind them than the wall of water in front of them.

At 8 p.m. Thursday, gabion dike contractors moved into the lowland area at Paddlewheel Park and began the all-night process of stringing together a wall of protective sand baskets down the middle of the street. The homes on the west side of the street are behind that temporary, portable sand wall.

"Where is the water? Where is the water?" said a resident named Ellen, whose house is on the east side - the riverside - of the dike. "I'm not worried about flooding at all. But if the water came over the banks, it would get it from the Fraser and we would get the backwash from the dikes."

"I'm not worried," said her neighbour Daisy Heyman. "It's three feet shy of what it was last year and it's already peaked, so no, I don't think we're going to have anything to worry about from the river, but that dike would make it worse for us."

About a dozen homes - most of them trailers - are now sequestered inside the sand walls. Fewer of them are protected behind the gabion baskets. One that is belongs to Joe and Rita LeBlanc, who have lived in the same spot for 20-plus years.

"We have never, ever been flooded. At the worst of times, the water gets to our grass. Our home has never been flooded. So they put a dike up at the last minute and miss the people who do get flooded. What are they thinking?" asked Rita.

"Are they stupid?," Joe said. "It just protects the one side, and we don't need it. I don't know what the hell got into them."

Them - staff at city hall - referred questions to the gabion dike contractors Surf-Tec as the "technical experts on the subject of gabions." Both city officials and Surf-Tec officials were unavailable for comment Friday.

Rick Kingdon, Harold Palmer and Gord Rogers had no issue with the skill of the dike deployment. Their contention was that the dikes were there at all, and clearly in the wrong spot to offer their respective homes any protection. The other issue was, they all got official notice at 7:30 p.m. that the dike was going in at 8 p.m.

"They had plenty of warning," said Kingdon. "I read in The Citizen that the city filled 4,000 sandbags. Where are they? Those could go in the right spot. They had a surveyor and a bunch of people in here at 11 Thursday morning, so they knew already they were going to do this. They had 50 guys here and all those machines working all night long. You could have put the same effort into sandbagging, back when the rain was first forecast, and we'd all be OK."

"It was like D-Day around here, and the whole job was wrong," said Palmer. "If they came two days earlier, none of this would have been necessary. It all adds up to silliness. It's just bizarre."

The residents collectively wondered if the city didn't do this on purpose to either damage the riverside homes beyond repair or scare the residents into leaving their homes permanently.

"Leave us alone," said Rogers. "We know the water comes up. It's affordable housing for some people. If you're going to go to all this trouble, do it right."