City won’t fight flood hazard maps

Province will take into account mitigation efforts

The city has dropped any bid it had to alter provincial flood hazard maps the mayor has derided as badly outdated, but it remains hopeful new rules won’t make developers and homeowners double up on existing flood mitigation projects the public purse has already funded.

In promising news for builders and residents in Inglewood and East Village, the municipal affairs minister’s office said the berms and elevated ground levels already built will indeed help homes qualify for flood assistance dollars when the next big disaster hits.

The province’s new flood-area development policy, released last week, would block future flood relief for homeowners who rebuild directly in the floodway, and demand special flood mitigation efforts such as berms, stilts or flood-proof seals if homeowners in the flood fringe want a post-flood aid the next time.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi, along with many residents and the Wildrose opposition, railed against the Redford government’s flood maps last week, noting they’re based mainly on data from 1983 and 1996.

He now said he’s confident with the provincial rationale he’s heard for using the old maps: that those were the red floodway zones and pink fringe zones that builders and residents used to develop and plan already, and they shouldn’t be changed now.

That means Inglewood and East Village still count as flood fringe, despite costly protection measures that did keep the Bow River’s raging waters from severely inundating either community last month.

The province could choose to count areas like that as already mitigated, or erase them from hazard zones, or still demand more protection measures there, Nenshi said Monday.

“My guess is for a bunch of those neighbourhoods, they’ll choose Option 1: it still shows in the flood fringe, but they show as mitigated flood fringe, which is the logical way to do it as far as I’m concerned,” he told reporters.

Existing protections will be recognized under the new flood-area policy, said Kathleen Range, a spokeswoman for Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths.

“It’s something we are going to work on community by community, looking at what’s in existence there already and what needs to be addressed, in consultation with the municipalities,” Range said.

The existing flood maps don’t reflect the vastly new river banks the Bow carved in places such as Inglewood, and don’t identify a 1-in-100-year flood hazard in parts of High River that were hardest hit despite sitting far from the Highwood River.

But the town was hit by something much bigger than a flood that only has a one per cent risk of happening in any year, Range said.

Canadian Press/files After arguing that provincial flood maps based on data from 1983 and 1996 were horribly out of date, the city has backed off and is hopeful flood mitigation efforts in some communities will be taken into account under new rules governing construction...