'It was completely underwater': Cambridge community remembers devastating flood 50 years later

May 17, 1974 started off like any other sunny spring day, but it very quickly turned into a day of disaster.

“I was in high school at the time and my boss came to get me and told me to help get stuff out of the business’ basement because apparently a flood was coming,” said Cambridge resident, Ross Light. “So I hopped on my motorcycle and went to the store and started working downstairs. I got a call from the top of the stairway: ‘Ross, get out of the basement, the water is coming across the street.’ So I went up, got on my motorcycle quickly and left to higher ground.”

Light, who was 17-years-old at the time, shared his story at the Cambridge Fire Hall 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 hurt but the impact devastated the community.

“For those people who know Cambridge well, Water Street right next to the river, it was completely underwater,” said museum volunteer Tom Reitz.

“It was quite some time after before things kind of returned to any sense of normal because of all of the mud and debris,” Light said. “My father had an office right on Water Street and all the files were soaked and expanded. It was a terrible.”

The flood was caused by weeks of wet weather and spring melt. It's still considered one of the largest floods ever recorded in the Grand River watershed.

“We got let out of school,” said Board Chair of the museum, Rob Brisson. “I came down here to see what the big fuss was all about. It brings back all kinds of memories and stories, phenomenal stories about what happened that day.”

Throughout the downtown core on Saturday, blue markings were displayed on store fronts and some streets, indicating the high water lines from that fateful day.

While some believe it was a rare occurrence, others worry the city could see something like this happen again.

“It's a very rare event, but you know, in terms of the climate change, maybe that's a future potential problem,” Brisson said.

“You can never say never, but there have been many, many procedures and things put in place to lessen, if not stop, that kind of major flooding from happening,” Reitz added.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the flood, the City of Cambridge and 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 berms, earthen walls.”

“There was a huge engineering study and they did a remediation of the river and then they built up berms on either side of the river,” Brisson explained. “They dredged the river to make it deeper so that there would be less of a possibility of the water spreading into the downtown core of Galt. There was a lot of damage through the downtown core of Galt some 50 years ago so their hope was to change that and it has.”

Now Brisson hopes to keep the memory of the event alive by assembling a historical collection of The Great Flood of ’74 which will be handed over to the City of Cambridge Archives

“So one of the things we're doing is videotaping the presentation of two engineers that were involved in the remediation of the river and then all this information that we're collecting from people. We've asked people to give their stories as well. And then you take YouTube and all that information we're collecting and we're going to give [it] to the archives because we've just kind of discovered that this is a generational thing. The generations are moving on and the stories are moving on and we want to capture that.”