Eight Canadian Armed Forces members are to arrive in Pimicikamak Cree Nation on Monday to help assess and repair water and electrical systems shattered by a days-long power outage, Chief David Monias says, while about 4,000 evacuees remain unable to return to the northern Manitoba community.
Help on the way
The chief of a Manitoba First Nation in the throes of severe water problems — flooding homes and backed-up sewage among them — says eight members of the Canadian Armed Forces are to arrive in his northern community on Monday.
Pimicikamak Cree Nation Chief David Monias said in a social media post that the members are to provide technical assistance, assessments and support related to critical infrastructure and recovery operations. Plumbers and other trades workers are also arriving to help with the water and electrical problems.
The deployment was not improvised. Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski announced on Jan. 9 that she and Defence Minister David McGuinty had approved sending “a specialized team” from the Armed Forces to Pimicikamak, at the request of both the First Nation and the Province of Manitoba, to provide assessment and advisory support focused on water treatment and sewage systems, power generation, project management and logistics. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said days earlier that the province was helping in any way it could, had asked Manitoba Hydro to examine the transmission line, and had asked Ottawa for the military’s help “so people can get home.”
The team was on the ground Monday as promised — seven members, whose first task was assessing one of the community’s water treatment plants — and a second team followed on Wednesday.
A community emptied out
Pimicikamak, also known as Cross Lake, sits more than 500 kilometres north of Winnipeg and is home to roughly 7,000 people. Its ordeal began on Dec. 28, when a power line went down in extreme cold and the community lost electricity for roughly four days. When the power eventually returned around Jan. 1–2, the damage was only beginning to show: with heat gone, water systems across the community froze, pipes burst, crawl spaces filled with icy water and sewage backed up into buildings.
About 4,000 residents were sent to other communities, including Winnipeg, Thompson and Norway House, during the outage — and they still have not come home, because the water damage makes their houses unlivable. Monias has said most of the First Nation’s more than 1,300 homes will require some form of repair. It is the community’s second mass displacement in less than a year; Pimicikamak also had to evacuate in the spring of 2025 because of wildfires.
Workers getting sick, too
Even the relief effort is straining. Monias said the community is having a difficult time finding adequate washrooms and shower facilities for the outside workers already arriving to help — and that some of those workers are themselves getting sick because of the lack of clean water in the community.
For evacuees, there is no timeline yet for going home. What happens next depends on what the military assessors and the trades crews find inside the water and sewage plants, and on how quickly hundreds of frozen, flooded homes can be made safe to live in again.
