Ted Kennedy stands in front of a neighbour’s house on Forest Avenue in Mount Pearl Saturday where a woman had to be removed from the house when the river near the house overflowed it’s banks. — Photo by Keith Gosse/The Telegram

A 90-year-old lady had to be lifted from her Mount Pearl home Saturday morning after heavy rains caused Forest Avenue properties to flood.

Standing in front of the still-flooded house Saturday afternoon, Forest Avenue resident Ted Kennedy guessed that at its peak, the Waterford River rose about two metres and overflowed its banks.

Kennedy said he'd been living in the area for 27 years, and while there's been flooding in the past, this is the worst he's ever seen.

He said earlier in the morning, his elderly neighbour had to be lifted from the house through a window by her son.

According to Environment Canada, 52 millimetres of rain fell between 8 p.m. Friday evening and 7 a.m. Saturday. Wind forecasts for Saturday were in the 100-120 kilometre per hour range.

After describing what happened, Kennedy was quick to lay blame on development in the area.

"There's nowhere for the water to run when the rivers are high, the roads are paved so the water is running over," he said.

"It just makes matters worse, and there's 500 houses going across the way there, so that's not going to help matters."

It was a similar story at the racetrack in Goulds, where horses had to be evacuated after a barn flooded.

As the wind whipped across the track, workers waded hip-deep leading horses and carrying equipment out of the barn.

Brett Whalen, general manager for St. John's Racing and Entertainment said that this was the third time they've been flooded in a week.

"It usually only happened in the spring when the snow was melting, but there's been a lot of development in this area," he said. "Now that that's been built up we're getting a lot more of the water down here."

There was also some flooding at the Corpus Christi Church near the Waterford River.

St. John's Mayor Dennis O'Keefe said he'd have to be briefed by city engineers, but he said city workers had braced for the storm as best they could.

"We always identify what I would call the critical areas of the city where flooding could take place," he said. "In anticipation of the storm, everything we could do, we did."

There were no updates from the city Sunday.

Commenting on the flooding on Forest Avenue, Mount Pearl Mayor Randy Simms said it was on a flood plain, and that was simply a liability.

He dismissed any attempt to blame this on developments that have happened in the city.

"Any development that's been done in Mount Pearl for the last several years all have water detention ponds attached to those developments," Simms said. "This is a natural flood occurrence as a result of the significant amount of water we've had"

jmcleod@thetelegram.com