Flood prevention research ramping up as forecasts increase

Three years, four moves and numerous renovations later, Kathleen Fox is only now getting settled after surviving Alberta’s worst flood. She’s having a housewarming party in two weeks. Invited are her decorator and many service providers, who have become personal friends over the long and arduous journey from flood to final move.

“It feels like I’ve finally left the flood behind,” she says, unpacking boxes in her new house on top of a hill, miles from either of Calgary’s two rivers.

The nightmare for Fox, an oil and gas engineer, began in June 2013, when she was flooded out of her house in East Elbow Park. Having bought into the neighbourhood after the 2005 Calgary flood — also a one-in-100-years flood — Fox believed she had done her due diligence. That house survived the 2005 flood intact. It wasn’t until the flood eight years later that she realized her house was indeed in the flood’s path.

(TODD KOROL FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

“I thought with the kind of inspections I had — and there was no damage, not a drop of water in 2005 — that surely to goodness the city saw what happened in 2005, that they wouldn’t let it happen again,” says Fox.

The city has invested in improvements. And the federal government created a new program to make funding available for municipalities to update their flood maps.

“There’s been a bit of a feeding frenzy around that, with local municipalities applying to get this funding,” reports Dave Murray, a water resources engineer and the president of the Canadian Water Resources Association.

Murray, who consults municipalities across Canada about how to improve flood-mitigation efforts, believes that governments are moving in the right direction, but slowly.

“We’re on the right track by spending more money, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.... That’s just to get things mapped and to figure out where the risks are. To actually build the infrastructure to protect against the floods — it’s hard to imagine how much that would even cost,” says Murray, who is also a consultant with Burnaby, B.C.-based engineering firm Kerr Wood Leidal, which specializes in water infrastructure.

As a result of climate change, Canada will experience more frequent and intense floods in some areas and droughts in others, notes physics professor Richard Peltier, director of the University of Toronto Centre for Global Change Science (CGCS) and an expert in the field of environmental change.

Golf carts and equipment were left high and dry in the middle of a golf course after the Bow River in Calgary flooded in 2013. (JOHN LEHMANN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

“It remains difficult for us to point to a given event and say with surety that the event was caused by global warming,” says Prof. Peltier. “There is an intense effort in the scientific community to address this. We can say that events like the one in Calgary, and also the flood in Toronto, are exactly the sort of events we expect to become more frequent, and more severe as we move deeper into the global warming era.”

CGCS was established in 2005 to lead research and education initiatives in global change science at U of T, which conducts leading-edge research on global climate modelling, all aspects of atmospheric chemistry research, and global change and the biosphere.

Modelling work includes the use of a range of climate-carbon cycle models to project possible future climates associated with different kinds of human interference in the climate system. According to Prof. Peltier, scientists at the U of T expect that, by 2050, the Great Lakes Basin of North America will be encountering events that normally recur every 50 years to increase in frequency to every 25 years.

Crews shore up the Highwood River against flooding in High River. Alta. in 2014, one year after it flooded the city. (JOHN LEHMANN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

Governments need to be prepared, Prof. Peltier warns. “The fear is that no significant action will be taken until an event occurs that is so severe, and does so much damage, that we can no longer turn our heads away.”

It’s called “the hydro-illogical cycle,” notes Murray. “You get this flood, everyone goes into a panic,” he says. “Then there’s a bit of a public backlash — Why did we flood? Why didn’t you protect us? Then there’s this huge awareness. Once awareness happens at the political level, there’s an opportunity for them to invest in proper protection.”

The federal government’s commitment to fund updated flood plain maps with the latest data on rivers and climate is, Murray says, the “brightest light in a long time.”

A displaced boat on lies on a front lawn in High River, Alta. after the city flooded in 2013. (JOHN LEHMANN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)

Another positive change that has occurred in the past two years is the availability of residential flood insurance in Canada.

For Kathleen Fox in Calgary, however, that insurance option came too late. “There was no overland flood insurance in Canada at that time,” she recalls. “Everything was just out of my pocket. Financially, it was very hard.”

When it came time to buy, she downloaded the updated flood inundation map and found a house in a safe area. “It was absolutely deliberate,” says Fox. “I gave the map to my real-estate agent and said, ‘I don’t want to be anywhere near this [flood] zone.’ I don’t need another disaster.”