What might have started with a few logs backed up in a river may have led to flooding in Ramara Township this spring.

Lynn Whelan lives along the Black River. Her house is high enough to avoid flooding in the spring but the garage isn’t so lucky.

“We have sort of let go of the fact that the garage will be nothing but drywall that’s full of mould because of the water.”

Whelan says the floods weren’t always so common.

“When we first came here it was every ten years, then it was every five and now it seems to be a regular occurrence.”

She isn’t alone. The water on the Black River gets so high it often backs up into Lake St. John in the spring. It’s common for basements to flood and for people to use canoes to get around.

But the mayor says he now knows what part of the problem is. A log jam not far from Whelan’s house has been building up.

“I’ve known about this blockage for the past four or five years but I didn’t know how big it was until last spring,” says Ramara Township Mayor Bill Duffy.

Duffy says river bed maintenance is the responsibility of the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) and he wants them to step in and take care of the problem.

“My first plan is that they hire somebody to take debris out or they give the municipality enough funds to hire someone.”

Duffy says people at the MNR told him they estimate about 25% of the river is being held up by the blockage. The fire chief says the debris can’t be cleared by natural water flow because trees and getting stuck on each other. He says the time to act is now.

“There’s only a small window of time when they can actually work on it once the snow starts or the high water starts in the fall and it makes it more difficult,” says Ramara Township Fire Chief Dave McCarthy.

“We have the power to pressure on the people responsible to do maintenance and what we’re asking for is yearly maintenance on the river to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” added Duffy.

Duffy tells CTV News he’s hoping to hear back from the MNR in the next few weeks and to have the problem dealt with before the end of the fall.