Where’s the plan to prevent future floods?
Warm summer nights in Calgary are usually filled with the noise of children playing outside, the smell of backyard barbecues and adults re-connecting with neighbours.
That’s not happening in a number of city neighbourhoods this year.
Instead, a walk through areas devastated by floods during the evening hours reveals only the sounds of generators on streets dotted with porta-potties and flood debris still in evidence.
This ain’t the summer anyone was expecting. And the same holds true for the floodplain plan announced Sunday by the provincial government. Where to begin? How about by asking what happened to the federal and provincial flood management dollars sent to the city post the 2005?
Or why the flood assessment report done after the 2005 flood did not surface until late 2011?
There were 18 recom- mendations contained in that report, which included a number of common sense items, such as maintaining a mapping system and putting in place a better warning system. It goes without saying that had the suggestion to update the maps been followed, the province would not be working with 30-year-old maps to come up with its latest plan.
Still, it’s not until the 12th recommendation that there is mention of options for mitigating flood risk. And that remains the critical piece in all this.
There are homes that were rebuilt after 2005, which included significant and costly modifications for better protection in the event of another flood.
Yet those measures did absolutely nothing when water levels rose almost four weeks ago. The point is, it’s fine for the province to come out with guidelines about how the homes should be fixed and rebuilt, but who in their right mind will do anything until they know what the plan to mitigate the impact of future floods will be?
This attendant uncertainty will lead to what no one likes to hear: unintended consequences.
Just as banks reassess borrowing lines for oil and gas companies when the commodity price outlook changes — for better or worse — the same holds true with mortgages and lines of credit secured by the value of homes. Just as uncertainty affects the corporate world, the collateral damage in this case is the value of Calgary real estate, which is inextricably connected to the city’s tax base. The money raised from the affected areas through property taxes will now have to come from somewhere else.
No one needs to be reminded of the consequences of the 2008 housing meltdown in the United States, which rendered many homeowners unable to move to new jobs in other jurisdictions because they could not afford to sell their houses. And there is no financing on a house if you can’t get insurance.
Let’s not forget many companies in this town got their start from people leveraging their homes in order to invest in new startups. Don’t think for a minute that this doesn’t happen any more. It’s a capital formation exercise that can — and has — contributed to the creation of businesses and ultimately the city’s tax base. To put this in another context, it’s been four weeks since Calgarians woke up to the raging waters of the Bow and Elbow rivers. It is the worst natural disaster that has occurred in this country and Calgarians have yet to hear from all levels of government that they are looking at every possible mitigation strategy aimed at minimizing the impact of another flooding event.
Yes, it’s true the government can speak to all residents in the red zone and ask them what they want in terms of compensation — what will make them whole — to permanently leave their homes, but that’s not the answer.
It can, under the Expropriation Act, choose to expropriate properties.
“But where is the macro view?” asked one homeowner in the red zone. “It’s fine to ask homeowners to manage what they can — their homes, which is the micro piece to all this — but it’s unrealistic for us to do that, if the government isn’t going to do something in a broader context.”
Then there is the issue of how to handle the other aspect of this — protecting the places that make the city what it is — the Calgary Zoo, the Stampede grounds, the Talisman Centre, the downtown core and of course the burgeoning areas being pegged for new development such as the East Village.
If you are Telus, which recently announced the development of a new tower in the downtown core, how comfortable are you with that decision, in light of what has taken place and in the absence of broader government assurances on how it plans to look at flood mitigation options?
For better or worse, Calgary was built at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers. One can’t simply negate all the development that has taken place with a swift pen stroke, although the City, as the final arbiter, will have to shoulder some of the responsibility.
If meetings held in recent days between government officials and a number of residents are any indication, that seems to be the direction the provincial government wants to take. Absent from these conversations are discussions, ideas, plans for long-term flood mitigation; it’s seems to be all about emptying neighbourhoods. And while some might think this is an opportunity for the development of new public spaces, that’s a bit simplistic. To do that means to destroy communities that are more than 100 years old and to push people out to the suburbs and further strain the already inadequate transportation infrastructure. Sure, people bought homes along the river because they liked the view. But just as important was proximity to downtown. To push people outside the core means to kiss goodbye the inner city schools that are the anchors for so many communities.
For a city — and an industry — scrambling to attract talent from around the world, that is not a compelling message.
The flood mitigation recommendations from the 2006 report, which were nowhere near as extensive as one might have expected, did contain numbers in the hundreds of millions in terms of what might be needed to develop the right diversion infrastructure.
As the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
There are ways to manage upstream flows, in addition to some practical measures such as dredging the Glenmore Reservoir to increase its capacity. As a first stop, one can look at Winnipeg and what was first completed in 1968 and later doubled after the 1997 flood. Then there’s the Room for the River Program underway in the Netherlands, and the measures that have been taken in both Britain and Germany to mitigate the impact of flooding by the Thames and the Rhine, respectively.
Lest anyone squawk about cost — and that is bound to happen in today’s world — there are ways to make all this work from a financial perspective by involving the private sector and institutional pools of capital from sources such as the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, Ontario Teachers and other sovereign wealth funds.
Meanwhile, four weeks on, the lack of clarity is not good. Yes, the volunteer spirit is alive and well, but it only goes so far. There comes a time when citizens need a plan from elected officials that they can buy into and believe in. That time is now. Then maybe, just maybe, the usual sounds of summer will be heard in those neighbourhoods at this time next year.