Guests

Program Highlights

• Governments face BIG costs:
  • Assume immediate and significant costs in securing and protecting citizens.
  • Assume the largest portion of costs to help citizens and businesses recover.
  • Face a very large expense to restore or rebuild flood damaged public infrastructure and facilities.

• The big hit to the public purse is flood-damaged public infrastructure. The public infrastructure rebuild costs can easily be in the many 100 millions for just one major flood event.

• The local business sector may be significantly impacted and its viability reduced by flooding. Some businesses will struggle or never recover.
• Local governments try to help restore normal business and employment activity within flooded urban areas as soon as possible after flooding.
• But the Peterborough experience shows this takes years and is quite costly for local government.
• In Canada, disaster insurance claim payments have more than doubled and government payments increased by more than an order of magnitude in just the last 10 years.
• Governments have to divert funding from other priority programs to finance recovery.
• Disasters have pushed the property and casualty insurance industry to unsustainable low margins.
• Total insurance payments show floods are one of the most costly of natural disasters.
• Floods have the largest per individual claim insurance cost.
  • NOTE: These are only the flood costs paid out by insurers.
  • Citizens and businesses cover very significant additional, but unreported, flood damage costs in addition to those covered by insurers and governments.

• Major floods harm the regional economy. Large floods can bring a major city to a halt for days causing millions of dollars damage to the local economy – the “lost” production, wages, sales and associated taxes are rarely recovered.
• For example, Houston Texas had a major flood in 2001 that halted much of its main road transportation system and many firms had to suspend production.
• A little later that year there was extensive flooding in an area northeast of Corpus Christie Texas
  • Closure for several days of approximately 165 roads several were interstate highways.
  • What was the dollar value impact on the regional economy of this event?

• Doubtless major floods impose very significant costs and will lead to permanent loss of some local businesses and employment.

• Occur within a few minutes or a few hours of excessive rainfall, a dam or levee failure, or a sudden release of water held by an ice jam.
• Can roll boulders, tear out trees, compromise foundations, destroy buildings and bridges, and scour out new channels.
• Rising water can reach substantial and dangerous heights.
• Flash flood-producing rains can also trigger catastrophic mud slides.
• “There are more flash flood related deaths than from any other natural disaster.
• The majority of these are people who attempted to drive through floodwater and did not make it. … Floodwater can move as fast as 30 mph [50kph] and contains debris and other hazardous materials.
• Over 50% of flood deaths in USA are auto related.
• Creeks and storm drains can raise as quickly as 1 ft/min [30cm/min]” (Clark County Nevada, 2004)

• There is a long history of physical (structural) adaptations:
  • dams, levees, weirs, constructed floodways, channelizing, diversions, raising structures, diking etc. (Lots of these in the Grand River Watershed.)
  • these attempt to control flood level and flow. But they “stiffen” the watercourse actually making it less resilient to respond to extreme weather events.
• Physical flood control facilities are able to provide protection only up to their design flood level and then can be overtopped or broached.
• Very costly to build.
• Costly to maintain and update.
• Give a false sense of security.

• Key non-structural tools: Watershed floodplain development policy and enforcement. Flood Insurance.
• Biggest problem in Australia, USA and some Canadian Provinces –Floodplain mapping and development control policy is not widely or aggressively enough used. Planning and development control on a Watershed basis is rare.
• Ontario is a leader in Watershed based management through its Conservation Authorities (established by the Les Frost Government in the 1940’s.) Unfortunately their authorities are being diminished by the More Homes Built Faster Act.
• My concern is: will People be allowed to live and have businesses in flood prone lands?

• Too much reliance has been placed on physical structure flood protection. More policy emphasis is needed on managing the potential impacts of increased development in watersheds and especially in greenbelts.
• The Australian and Quebec governments rely a lot on dike systems. They face a long future of structural upgrading costs - even though many of the structures will lose effectiveness (e.g., silting up of reservoirs) and will eventually fail (eg., broaching old levees and dikes) 
• “Structural methods have certainly reduced the risk of some flooding but have not eliminated the risk. For example, in the Grand River Basin all of the dike systems have at times failed except for the dikes constructed or repaired in the past 25 years”
• Even properly functioning physical structures may be limited in their ability to assist in a particular flood emergency: “… at the time of the 1974 Grand River flood all reservoirs were full and unable to significantly reduce downstream flooding.”

• Extreme Weather – Climate change is presenting us with very large variations in weather. Extreme events are more significant and more frequent – there are more excessive rainfall events, more droughts.
• Watershed Urbanization (Increased Population & Land Use Density) makes the problem worse – Watersheds are becoming less resilient. Floods are higher and storm water flows faster

• Consider the recent series of storms that lashed the BC and Atlantic coasts.
• Recently exceptionally a series of successive heavy “atmospheric river” rainstorms lashed California causing damaging floods, deaths, and mudslides.
• Consider 2021’s Abbotsford floods
• Extreme weather events are becoming wide-spread. This extreme weather increase has been underway for quite a while.

• July 14th and 15th, 2004, the City of Peterborough was inundated by a massive stalled summer thunderstorm producing an overland flood that resulted from that 200 year flood level rainfall event.
• Over 200mm (9 inches) of rain fell in under 4 hours in this normally dry time of the year -extensively flooding the central business district and many residential areas.

• Concern about the potential flood effects that can result from urbanizing a watershed and areas of the greenbelt.
  • The impervious area within a development is driven by the development’s increased lot yield, road widths, open space allocations, landform and private landscape treatments.
  •  There is a distinct trend to smaller urban lots that increase residential density .
  • The increased density results in part from government policy requirements toward “densification.” 
  • This increases the impervious fraction within most new development areas and hence increases flood runoff.

• A 1:100 year flood happened 20 years ago, so we won’t get another one like that for another 80 years. (You could actually experience a 100 year level flood the next year!)
• Only buildings that fall within the 100 year flood line are at risk of flooding and buildings which fall outside the line will never be flooded. 
• Because it has not happened before it cannot happen.
• Construction of a levee (dike) puts us in a flood-free zone.

• Reporting Emphasis: the “experience” - deaths, water levels, people displaced, damage to property and possessions, inconvenience, any apparent government employee or facilities failure of coping with the emergency, how this flood compares to others, pride in how well the community is coping, etc.
• Major floods are always described as unusual, unprecedented, storm of the century, etc. (Makes it sound it’s so rare and unlikely to repeat.)
• Much media coverage focuses on emergency response and unusual conditions brought about the flood.
• Once the emergency is “over” and the first stage of cleanup is finishing, the flood becomes less newsworthy to the media and reporting switches to other “more interesting” topics.
• Rare follow up articles about root causes of flooding, how floods might be prevented, and what flood mitigation steps need to be addressed in the community.
• Media complacency with long term flood mitigation planning helps build public perception that there is little abiding risk from floods.

• We need a Flood Informed Public: A communications strategy is needed to provide useful information about flood risks and obtaining protection (through insurance and site improvements.)
• Remember: It is essential to keep people out of flood waters.
• Do citizens know their risks?

• Conservation Authorities and Regional Planners should:
  • Provide clear information that 100 year precipitation events used for design levels do not provide 100 years of safety.
  • Clearly publicize the risk of living and working in the floodplain. Point out that vigilance is required when storms are active.
  • Provide information tools that citizens can use to understand their flood risk.

• Most household insurance policies only cover water damage from internal problems (eg. broken pipe, cracked toilet, failed water heater..)
• Sewer backup and overland water flow are not usually covered unless specified in the policy.
• (I’ve added a sewer backup/overland water flow rider to my policy!)

• It all comes down to local planning being required to be consistent with the overall best interests of all residents of a watershed.
• For watershed and flood mitigation planning to be effective, politicians must ensure their governments invest in establishing and maintaining the necessary planning and regulatory authority in appropriate regional watershed institutional frameworks.
• Professional planners and engineers, and emergency managers must help politicians reach this important goal.
• If each of us learns about our risks, takes appropriate action, and ensures Government does not weaken policies, we may avoid having to issue every citizen these …

Closing Remarks & Reminders