Will province follow through on ambitious plans for prevention?
Premier Alison Redford’s zeal for flood relief is beyond doubt. But is she serious about defending against the next big flood on our glorious, beautiful, terrifying rivers?
Flood mitigation, unlike crisis relief, is so far vague and undefined. It already seems to be fading into committees, consultations, public meetings and looming conflicts between the province and municipalities.
The city now has a task force. Redford has assigned a working group to gather the best floodcontrol methods from around the world. The province expects the municipalities to produce floodcontrol plans.
This kind of chatty activity often leads to great ideas, followed by complete loss of official interest. There’s no more vivid example than the PC government’s burial of a report that followed the 2005 floods.
This time, though, Alberta seems to have a premier who means it.
If she does keep her very clear promise, there will be river valley flood work from one side of the south to the other, over as long as 10 years; or at least, as long as she’s around.
“There’s going to have to be community flood mitigation proj- ects,” Redford said in a Herald interview Thursday. “We’re going to have to build that infrastructure.
“It’s not simply about compensating people that were impacted by the flood, or asking them to flood-proof their homes; it’s also saying there’s work that needs to be done right across the province, in order to make sure we’re dealing with flood impacts in the future.”
After meeting in Toronto with insurance company CEOs, Redford made some comments that explain why mitigation measures will take time to shape up.
“There’s no sense in us going out as a provincial government, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure that will protect communities, and then have the insurance companies say, ‘yeah, well, that’s not good enough for us to provide coverage.’”
There will be long, detailed talks with the industry to make sure that each project makes properties insurable.
It’s one of those disquieting reminders of the immense power of people who manage risk and control capital pools, mostly from outside the province.
Finance Minister Doug Horner had to sell the banks before he could announce Tuesday his loan program and interest rate subsidies for small business. The insurance issue is similar, although a lot more complex.
Sounding somewhat like a clause in a policy, the premier said:
“So we want to make sure the technical work is being done, that the flood mapping is done well, that the data we’re using to put in place community mitigation strategies that will prevent or reduce the impact of flooding in the future, is actually going to be meaningful in terms of how insurance companies are going to assess risk in the longer term.”
Redford would not promise that the next flood will be less damaging than this one, even after a lot of flood prevention work is done.
Such a promise would “not be appropriate,” she said, and she’s right. That would be prophesy, not politics.
But the premier saw enough of this flood to know that standard measures don’t work.
“As we move forward in terms of flood mitigation, it’s not going to be good enough to rebuild what we had before — obviously, because it didn’t work.
“We’re going to have to look at doing things better and differently.”
As soon as possible, please.