Damage assessments are underway in the Town of Carman now that water levels on the Boyne River have subsided.

An ice jam downstream was to blame for the back-up of water that threatened dozens of homes and damaged infrastructure. Because of this incident, Mayor Bob Mitchell says Council will be asking the province to install control structures on the culverts at the Carman Diversion and explains that should a similar scenario unfold in the future, these controls would stop the water from coming into town.

"The way the Diversion works is there's three culverts - big ones - that are sized to allow the water to come through that the river channel can take and get rid of, but with the ice jam, the water couldn't get away so it was backing up and it was actually rising on the Diversion dam and because of that you get the overland flooding, other than that it would've ran just fine."

Mitchell adds there was more water coming in than was able to go out through the river channel and as a result, it was backing up into the areas that used to flood before the Carman Diversion was built.

Meantime, the Mayor says things are slowly getting back to normal in Carman now that the river has gone down and confirmed that Council will be applying for Disaster Financial Assistance. Mitchell says officials are currently in the process of compiling a list of all the damages.

"We have to get an engineering assessment done (on the 1st St. bridge) to see what damage is and whether it needs to be fixed or replaced, we had quite a few houses that had water in them (and) we had a pump at our main lift station blow."

He explains the bridge repairs/replacement could come at a cost as high as $1.5 million dollars and the lift station pump has a price tag of about $42,000. The Town is currently renting a replacement pump at a cost $2,000 - $3,000 per month.

Mitchell says the total amount of DFA funding requested will depend on the reports that come in from homeowners and the results of the engineering report on the bridge.