Pictures of the week: Water Memories

This elegant clapboard house in Venise-en-Québec – which needs no translation – on the shores of Lake Champlain in southern Québec, was photographed on 1 June 2011 (above) and again in October the same year. In the first shot, floodwater a foot high poured into the basement and lapped at the porch steps. Potted flowers and shrubs appear to float and a pedalo is moored up like a speedboat.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

The floods arrive around April every year – a combination of snowmelt, proximity to the lake and climate change – but those in 2011 reached record-breaking levels. The day this photograph was taken, the water was 2.3m above average flood levels – quite significant for a lake with flat shores – and the nearby Richelieu river burst its banks.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

The floods damaged more than 3,000 houses, forcing hundreds of people from their homes.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

Yet many decided to stay, adapting, as they must each year, to their temporary new watery world. Social ties grow stronger as neighbours look out for each other, and the community rallies into teams of volunteers sand-bagging, dropping off provisions and, as the waters recede, cleaning up the debris.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

Late spring is the start of the all-important tourist season in this region, and to stay put sends out the important message that, just as in the film Jaws, the beaches and campsites are open for business.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

Photographer Michel Huneault, who lives locally, was struck by the contrast between this annual inundation and another disaster zone, Haiti, which he had visited a year after the 2010 earthquake, a few months before the floods arrived in Québec.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

The catastrophe in Haiti claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, caused unimaginable damage and suffering, and was a huge international event; during the floods of 2011, no one lost their life and damage was, comparatively, minimal. Yet the local media whipped up a storm: in this relatively sleepy part of the world, les inondations, as they are known, are a big story.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

Huneault’s diptychs, showing the before-and-after effects of the floodwaters, are a common way of depicting major disasters – think of the 2004 tsunami or the Japan earthquake.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

Yet here, there’s a “sense of beauty and serenity” in the flooded photographs, and only four months later almost no trace of damage as the autumn leaves start to fall on the lush front lawn. Inside the house might be a different story.→
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris

We have an ambiguous relationship with bodies of water, Huneault believes – we are drawn to live near them, yet know them to be unpredictable. These residents have clearly decided that to live near an idyllic lake is worth a few months’ disruption. • This article was edited on 30 May 2013. The original referred to "Camplain Lake" where it should have said Lake Champlain.
Photograph: Michel Huneault/Cosmos/Polaris