Epcor to rank flood risks citywide
Live near a hospital or substation? You’re in luck.
Epcor officials are busy prioritizing neighbourhood pockets across the city based on how likely they are to flood and what critical infrastructure is nearby.
At-risk homes beside a hospital, a school, electrical substation or the LRT will see the biggest investments first as Edmonton prepares for more extreme and frequent flash floods in neighbourhoods far from the river. Anyone who lives farther from that critical infrastructure should be double-checking the strength of their basement window wells and home insurance.
“You cannot protect for everything. It’s a risk question,” said Epcor senior vice-president Stephen Stanley in a recent interview.
Epcor took over Edmonton’s $2-billion to $4-billion flood protection plan when it acquired Edmonton drainage last September. Its deeper pockets could get critical upgrades done faster, officials said, and now they ’re planning the next moves.
By October, they aim to publicly release the entire prioritized list of 1,243 drainage sub-basins. A subbasin is roughly one-quarter the size of a neighbourhood.
Residents will be able to find their home on the map and prioritized list.
“It’s going to be very important to be transparent,” said Stanley, promising not just to release the maps but to push out the information to at-risk homeowners with an education campaign. That way people in areas with a high likelihood of flooding but less critical infrastructure will be warned and told what they can do to individually protect their homes.
Many in Edmonton automatically think of the river as Edmonton’s main flood risk.
But actually, it’s the severe rainstorms that roll in and can stall over a neighbourhood. Those damage more basements and other infrastructure, and the city is seeing those storms become more frequent and more severe.
But how likely is any one home to flood? In some cases, it might make more sense to invest in helping homeowners evaluate lot drainage and window wells rather than building another multimilliondollar catch basin, Stanley said. Or that might be an interim step during the years Epcor is working elsewhere.
“Even ( being optimistic), it’s going to take 20 years to do this, up to 50 years,” said Stanley. “You have to prioritize.”
Epcor officials made a presentation on this plan to council’s utility committee late last month. They ’re due back in April to discuss insurance implications. In June they’ll finalize the exact criteria to rank neighbourhoods.
The list of neighbourhood subbasins comes in October, with a construction plan in April 2019.
Susan Ancel, Epcor’s new director of stormwater strategies, said the team is also looking to partner with private developers to encourage drainage techniques to hold back more water on-site during a storm.
“That (low impact development) might not necessarily help (during an) intense storm but they will help make capacity on the periphery of the storm. So when the intense storm comes through we’ve got more capacity to move that water,” she said.
Home insurance also has to be in the conversation.
Overland flooding insurance is newly available from many insurance providers and 25 per cent of homeowners in have Alberta opted in, said Stanley.
The province has said that once that insurance is widely available, they will no longer cover flood damages through disaster assistance. He expects that will happen soon.