Extreme weather ravages cities’ budgets
Storm costs run into hundreds of millions of dollars
Governments across the capital region are increasingly grappling with an expensive problem that farmers and tourism businesses have faced for generations — the damage done by extreme weather.
This year’s flooding. Last year’s six tornadoes. More flooding the year before that — in two stages, because 2017 brought May floods on the big rivers and then flash floods after heavy rain in October.
Add in freeze-thaw cycles that chew up roads, and a drought or two, and we have had weather in recent years that sliced the best budget forecasts into little shreds.
Now city planners are warning that our infrastructure is at risk from a warming climate. And protecting that infrastructure comes at great cost.
Some examples:
The danger includes snowfall. Wild winter weather in the first three months of 2019 caused a $16.2-million deficit in the City of Ottawa’s winter maintenance budget, according to figures released by city hall.
The overtime bill for public works — all those snowplow and salt truck drivers — ran to $7.5 million in the first quarter of this year alone — more than the department had budgeted for all of 2019.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada says severe weather caused $1.9 billion of damage in Canada last year.
For instance, the tornadoes caused $295 million in insurance costs.
High winds in May of last year caused $410 million in damage in southern Ontario and parts of Quebec, with $380 million of that in Ontario.
A thunderstorm last year dropped 72 millimetres of rain on Toronto, with 51 mm falling in one hour. The extensive flooding across western and central parts of the city cost $80 million.
In Ontario, the record for damage from a storm is still held by the 2013 Toronto floods, which caused almost $1 billion in damage. (Toronto, with pavement everywhere and insufficient sewers, now floods a lot.)
Ottawa prepared a document this March (shortly before the latest flood) summarizing the threat of a changing climate to its $42 billion worth of infrastructure:
“Most existing infrastructure was not designed to withstand future climate conditions and extremes,” it says. “Older stormwater systems, for example, were not built to handle the volume of run-off resulting from extreme rainstorms, especially given the impermeability of urban development, and the lack of overland flow routes designed for flows exceeding sewer capacity.
“Buildings, bridges and transit infrastructure need to withstand rising temperatures, more frequent and intense rainfall, and higher wind, snow or ice loads. Roads and pipes are weakened by high heat or more frequent freezethaw cycles. Infrastructure that services water supply and waste water management must withstand power disruptions.
“Like many cities, Ottawa faces a significant deficit in repairing and replacing existing infrastructure. Our roads, pipes, buildings and other infrastructure are designed to last up to 100 years. Current infrastructure investments must reflect future climate conditions to ensure they perform under these new conditions and deliver the services our community needs. An additional challenge is how to pay for upgrades required to service our communities as they grow and intensify.”
Another factor is that a growing and increasingly dense city has less green space to soak up heavy rain, it notes. More water runs off, causing flooding. Urban trees can’t get enough to drink, yet we need them to cool us.
The document, like many in the past 30 years, says a lot about how we should walk and cycle more and live in a greener city.
Gatineau wants federal money. It recently passed a motion to ask the federal government to “provide municipalities with predictable, flexible and long-term funding for infrastructure to help them reduce disaster risk and adapt to climate change.”
It also wants the feds “to support regional approaches to climate risk assessment, as well as the development and implementation of natural disaster risk reduction plans, including watershed flood mitigation plans.”
But in our region, often the biggest problems are in the smallest municipalities, which combine three troublesome factors: Hills where water rushes down after heavy rain, long roads, and small populations to pay for the damage.
Chelsea Mayor Caryl Green says modern storms are dumping heavier rains than storms in the past.
“Our biggest issue has been the increased amount of rain at a very rapid rate. Our culverts can’t accommodate that flow. Then the roads get washed out and it’s exacerbated by the soil conditions here: We have Leda clay and that can often cause landslides around the road infrastructure.”
The Outaouais is hilly, and heavy rains produce a torrent going downhill fast. Chelsea and its hilly neighbours have flooded in 2011, 2017 and 2019, with Highways 105 and 148 having sections washed out along with many smaller roads.
“But there is also the freezethaw cycle,” which Green says is causing more trouble with milder winters.
“Maybe once a week we’re having the rain and freezing. The effects on the roads is very destructive … Chunks are heaved up. It’s very expensive.”
Chelsea had to spend $1.2 million in 2011 to replace an old dam with a stronger one. Then came the road work.
Meech Road needed expensive work in 2011, and more repairs after the flood of 2017.
In 2017, Fleury Road and Notch Road both washed out twice in successive rainstorms. “We had 260 millimetres (of rain) in 24 hours,” Green said. That’s 10.2 inches.
“So it was repaired quickly and then it washed out a second time. Our staff had to put in larger culverts without authorization (from the province) but in an emergency you have just got to keep the road open.”
“We’re at risk from so many things related to climate change — the heavy rains, the landslides,” said Joanne Labadie, mayor of Pontiac. “And it’s hard to think about it (after a flood) but the other extreme is drought, and forest fires.”
Floods are her first concern, sitting at the base of the Eardley Escarpment where water pours straight down.
Quebec has generally covered about three-quarters of the costs of fighting spring floods, chiefly for sandbagging, cleanup and for construction of a shoulder-high dike this spring in the village of Quyon.
Her municipality of nearly 6,000 residents has spent about $750,000 this spring on equipment, road repairs and overtime.
On top of that, a single culvert that washed out between Masham and Wolf Lake will cost $500,000 to replace.
And other culverts and road washouts are still not repaired. The total will likely pass $1 million.
“Will we be compensated? We still don’t know,” she said.
Humans have made flooding worse, because farms are now tiledrained. This is an underground system that drains off excess water from fields — good for the farms, but a source of extra water flowing through municipal ditches and culverts after a storm. Which means the ditches need to be enlarged — but at whose expense? She wants provincial grants, since the province subsidized the tile drains in the first place.
“That land that used to absorb all the water — it now rushes out very quickly,” she said.
Labadie is both the mayor and a farmer — she has a small winery — and says it was water from her north field, near the base of Lusk Falls, that caused a sinkhole to open on Highway 148.
Floods have also raised Pontiac’s long-term infrastructure costs. The 2017 spring floods forced out 29 families from homes near the river, and some of these have simply been abandoned in their damaged state, waiting for the municipality to take them over — with the cost of demolition, and no chance to sell the land afterward.
“That’s also a loss of tax revenue,” said Labadie.
To the north, the little municipality of Denholm permanently closed Paugan Road, the main link between communities on the east and west sides of the Gatineau River. It washed out in 2016 and again in 2017, sending everything from police cars to school buses on a long trek down to the crossing at Wakefield, more than 20 kilometres south.
Denholm has fewer than 600 permanent residents, and with the 2017 road repair bill estimated to be at least $1.5 million, the little community decided it just can’t keep paying. It asked the province to either take over the road or provide regular funds for maintenance, but the province said no. People are now driving around the concrete barricades and Road Closed signs and risking the busted-up road.
There’s also the cost of housing. After the tornadoes, and again during the floods, Gatineau had to find hotels for hundreds of displaced people at a time, sometimes for months.
Meanwhile governments are still grappling with how much to blame on climate change, and how much is just bad weather in the traditional sense.
For instance, many politicians have blamed the 2017 and 2019 floods on climate change. Yet climate experts are often more cautious, especially regarding this year’s flood. It came after a long, cold winter with a snowpack that set some records for depth (the Mississippi Valley watershed) and was near the record in other places (the Rideau watershed.) Ottawa had snow on the ground without a break from mid-November, and a long skating season on the Rideau Canal. Cold winters with heavy snow are the opposite of what climate theory predicts for our region.
And while Ottawa says our weather is becoming “more variable,” it’s difficult to find formal studies that support this. Some violent storms, such as tornadoes, are notoriously difficult to identify when they occur in remote areas, which makes a long-term database hard to create.
Extreme rainfall trends are also hard to prove.
The city, Ontario and Environment Canada teamed up to produce a 2011 study of climate in our region, which says there’s no reason to believe that rain is becoming more severe. The study says that it does rain more often in the spring and fall than it used to, while there has been no change in rainfall in summer. It adds: “While the Study Area is experiencing more precipitation, there is not a clear indication that the intensity of precipitation events is increasing. This is partly due to the lack of long-term data required to assess whether or not actual changes in precipitation intensity at hourly intervals are occurring.” tspears@postmedia.com twitter.com/TomSpears1
Roads and pipes are weakened by high heat or more frequent freeze-thaw cycles.