Newborn’s family homeless after flood

A Thunder Bay family with a newborn baby may have to move back to Slate Falls due to lack of housing in the city after the May 27 flood.
“I don’t really want to (move),” said Desmond Roundhead, father of the newborn daughter who was born two days before the flood. “I moved out of Slate Falls two years ago to start a family and stay here in Thunder Bay.”
Crystal Meeseetawageesit said her newborn baby is picking up the stress her parents are feeling due to their situation.
“She wants more comfort,” Meeseetawageesit said. “She knows her parents are stressed.”
The family was flooded out of their basement apartment two days after their baby was delivered on May 25.
“It was actually her (Meeseetawageesit’s) first night back home and we were kind of tired so we went to bed kind of early before the rain started,” Roundhead said. “She woke up to use the washroom about 4:30 in the morning and her feet hit the water. It was really cold.”
Meeseetawageesit woke Roundhead up after she realized the basement apartment was flooded.
“I noticed there was just over a foot of water in the apartment,” Roundhead said. “I didn’t know what to do because you don’t expect something like that here in Thunder Bay.”
The couple lost just about everything they owned to the flood, including a supply of baby formula that was floating in the basement.
“I know they’re sealed, but I didn’t want to risk it because I don’t know what is in that water,” Roundhead said about using the soaked containers of formula. “(The water) was like an inch or two inches below the (electrical) plug-ins, so we were kind of lucky we woke up at the time.”
Roundhead and Meeseetawageesit saved as much of their possessions as possible before leaving the apartment and walking in the rain over to Roundhead’s father’s house.
“By the time we came back to grab whatever else we could, the water was already up to my knees,” Roundhead said. “So I was like don’t go back in there. Whatever else is in there is lost. We can’t save anything because that water is really brown.”
Roundhead said his father’s house did not flood even though it was nearby his apartment and next to another house that was also flooded.
A few days later, Roundhead and Meeseetawageesit had to leave the house due to family issues.
“I called that 98 FLOOD number and they were going to put us in the (Thunder Bay Shelter House),” Roundhead said. “I told them, ‘I don’t think so, I have a newborn baby.’ At the time, she was six days old.”
Roundhead said they were sent by cab on June 1 to stay in the Neebing Arena, which had been set up to accommodate people who had been flooded out of their homes.
“We were there for a night,” Roundhead said, noting the arena was loud with a fan going all night. “Sleeping on cots was bad enough. People were coming at all hours to take a shower.”
On June 2 they picked up a variety of donations, including clothes and items for the baby, from a number of outlets across Thunder Bay.
That evening, they moved into emergency accommodations at Lakehead University for about three weeks.
“In the units where we were staying, the entire units were full of families,” Roundhead said. “Everybody had mixed emotions: angry, scared, shocked and just victimized.”
Meeseetawageesit said most of the people staying at the university didn’t have any insurance on their homes.
“They lost everything,” she said.
Although they were provided with meals three times a day at the university cafeteria,
Roundhead said: “just try eating cafeteria food for three weeks.”
Roundhead and Meeseetawageesit began looking for an apartment while at the university, but did not have any success as of June 27.
“With Ontario Works we only get $637 for rent and everybody is raising their prices,” Roundhead said.
Roundhead is expecting some assistance from his band but Meeseetawageesit does not expect any assistance.