May 7 - May 13, 2008

Every day is Mother’s Day - with two sets of twins!


Cheeky flasher
naked dasher

Woman shocked by sex request

A trip to Lac Philippe did not go as planned when a 33-year-old woman from Greely, Ont. was followed by a naked man April 22.

At 1:20 p.m. the woman was walking along a beach when a man approached her and started speaking to her, said MRC des Collines Officer Martin Fournel.

“He said, ‘Look, you are very pretty,’ ” said Fournel. “After, he said, ‘Do you want to have sex with me? Obviously the answer was ‘No.’ ”

The man walked away, but several minutes later the woman noticed that he was still looking at her from behind a tree. He disappeared.

“A few minutes later, he comes walking towards her, but he was naked this time,” said Fournel. “She was shocked. She didn’t know what to do.”

Before the naked man caught up with her, the woman had already called for help to another man walking nearby. The naked man then walked away towards a parking lot, said Fournel.

The man was described as approximately 30 years old, 5’9” and weighing 200 lbs. He was last seen wearing dark shorts and a beige t-shirt. Anyone with information is asked to call MRC des Collines police.

The incident follows several similar events in recent years at Meech Lake. In May 2007, Chelsea man Xavier Chouart pleaded guilty to charges of nudity and indecent exposure, and was banned from Gatineau Park for three years.

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Gobble Gobble
Bang Bang

Bussiere bags a big’un

Some may have called it a turkey of an idea, but five years after the plan got off the ground, La Peche Mayor Robert Bussiere kicked off the region’s first-ever wild turkey hunt with a bang – literally.

Bussiere was up bright and early, around 5:30 a.m. May 2, to get a headstart on the first day of a five-day turkey hunt. By 11 a.m., the mayor was holding up his prize: a hefty, 18-pounder, male turkey.

“I finally got one,” said Bussiere. “It was really a lot of fun. For somebody who loves hunting, I think it’s a very nice experience.”

With a special whistle emulating the female turkey’s call, Bussiere spent all those hours traipsing across his property with a 12-gauge gun, calling the turkeys to come to him. He said it was “beautiful” receiving so many responses, a soon-familiar “goggle goggle” sound coming from the males, even hundreds of feet away.

“I finally got one,” said Bussiere. “It was really a lot of fun. For somebody who loves hunting, I think it’s a very nice experience.”

“I didn’t think they would answer that much,” he said. “It was a beautiful experience.”

But actually getting a turkey is easier said than done. Although Bussiere spotted many, it was no easy feat getting close to them, he said. Sometimes they wouldn’t get any closer than 200 ft.

“I was dressed in camouflage, but my face wasn’t covered, so apparently they can see you from quite far,” said Bussiere. “Just the movement of your eyes, they can see.” These wild turkeys have about five times the hearing and seeing ability of humans, he said.

Finally, the mayor spotted four males and one female. From about 100 feet away, Bussiere snatched up one of the big ones. At 5 p.m. May 2, Bussiere became the second person to register his turkey kill.

He was unsure of how many turkeys were killed in total before the first-ever La Peche wild turkey hunt wrapped up May 6. Results on the number of hunters who participated and the number of birds killed should arrive in about a month, said Bussiere.

It may take a few years for the economic benefits of the turkey hunt to be noticeable since most hunters are not used to hunting in the springtime, said Bussiere. But once the hobby catches on, wild turkeys will draw hunters and bird lovers to the region, stimulating restaurant, hotel and gas sales throughout La Peche, he said.

A few years to see the benefits may seem like a long time to farmers like Low’s Steve Connolly, who has complained the turkeys defecate all over his property and destroy his crops. In the meantime, the turkey population continues to grow, but the hunting season will also get longer each year to compensate, said Bussiere.
Before this year’s hunt, the region’s turkey population was sitting around 10,000, having grown from the initial 100 turkeys set free in La Peche and Val-des-Monts five years ago.

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Landslide memories timely reminder

Thirty-five years ago this week Benoit Lafond was in the process of establishing Ben’s Towing business on Hwy 105 in Chelsea. Two houses south of Ben’s yard Hector LeBlanc was preparing to move into his new Chelsea home.

Rising above these two men, about 300 metres west, contractors were close to finishing the extension of Hwy 5 from Mont Bleu in Gatineau to Scott Rd.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 8, 1973, as Lafond approached his land, he noticed a car heading south on Hwy 11, (now Hwy 105), its windshield covered in mud.

Curious, he turned into his yard, to be met by an almost surreal sight.

The leaves on the trees, along with everything else before Lafond’s eyes, were covered by an ugly grey smog.

And in the sky directly above him were three helicopters, circling.

The reason for this unusual scene, Lafond discovered, was a dramatic landslide triggered by workers building the Hwy 5 extension. An incident, according to both Lafond and LeBlanc, which could have been avoided.

The helicopters were scouring the debris for victims.

As it turned out, no injuries were sustained by the mass of rubble that poured down the creek literally a few metres from Lafond’s garage.

In his mind the driver of the mud-splattered car was the luckiest person alive that day. “He just made it,” said Lafond recalling the fateful day. “Thirty seconds later, he would have been killed.”

He wasn’t the only person lucky to survive the ordeal.

According to an account of the landslide, given by Bruce Lister in Up the Gatineau!, the contract workers building te new highway only just escaped with their lives.

From late January 1973 they had dynamited rock from gorges and filled an adjacent bog with aggregate weighing around 100,000 tonnes. Beneath the bog were nine metres of deposited marine clay, among it, said Leblanc, the “very unpredictable leda clay,” which is about 50 per cent water.

On that May 8, a bulldozer worker observed cracks, then a crater ,appear in the new roadbed. The workers dashed 60 metres to safety on a rocky outcrop before witnessing a 10-metre deep crater swallow up the bulldozer, a truck and other construction gear.

Without warning, rocks, mud and partially liquefied leda clay, all fed by the spring runoff, hurtled down the stream valley, picking up trees, bushes and a few old tires from Ben’s Towing on the way.

The debris destroyed what was then Hwy 11, carved a notch under the railway tracks and dumped a mass of mud and rocks into the Gatineau River at Horseshoe Bay (just south of Peter’s Point).

According to LeBlanc, a 40-metre stretch of Hwy 11 was washed away, and the pounding rocks gouged an 18-metre-deep hole in the highway.

On May 11 engineers tried to reduce the pressure on the Hwy 11 embankments by digging a shallow trench, but it caused more liquefied mud to surge out of control toward the river.

It resulted, as Lister explains, in a 20-metre chasm under the railway line opening up, and “the rails, with ties still attached, hung like a jungle rope bridge across it.”
Back at the source, 50 metres of newly laid Hwy 5, about 100 metres north of where the Chelsea cell tower stands today, was obliterated.

While workers set about rebuilding the highways, there was some speculation the landslide should never have occurred.

Leblanc said the contractor “kept on spreading rock and earth,” rather than put in a culvert. From his experience working in the construction business, if a culvert had been put in first, the landslide “probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Lafond reinforced this view, stating that an engineer at the time had said the contractor “must put a culvert in.”

The memories of 1973 offer a stark reminder of the risk of leda-clay landslides today. Two roads in Chelsea, including a section of Hwy 105, have suffered partial collapse since April 28. They are both closed until further notice while awaiting advice from engineers.

After the 1973 incident, Hwy 5 workers did put a proper culvert in and finished the extension to Scott Rd.

Hwy 11 remained closed for six weeks, allowing LeBlanc and his wife Louise to not only move in, but live in “peace and quiet” while northbound traffic was rerouted via Old Chelsea and Scott Rds.

The railway track and embankment were restored by fall 1973, although the train did not run until a year after the landslide in May 1974.

Through it all Lafond, still able to access his land, “never stopped working,” albeit with a little more mud on his hands than usual.

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