Mitigation projects up for debate
Five years later, Calgary remains at risk of flooding
After the devastating 2013 floods that swept through Calgary and southern Alberta, the province vowed to build the dams and dikes, the berms and canals, needed to avoid a repeat of the deluge.
But the story of flood mitigation infrastructure in the five years since the flood has been one of both real progress — with hundreds of millions of dollars going to smaller-scale projects — and ongoing uncertainty around two of the biggest items on the agenda.
The Springbank offstream reservoir aimed at stemming flooding on the Elbow River basin has been beset by delays and dug-in opposition.
For the Bow River, meanwhile, the province still must determine the best infrastructure option to prevent another massive flood through Calgary’s downtown.
Brenda Leeds Binder, co-president of the Calgary River Communities Action Group, isn’t blaming the provincial government but is frustrated with the current state of affairs, especially when it comes to the Springbank dry reservoir her organization sees as critical for the city’s future safety.
“Where we need to be further along is what the province can do for us,” she said in a recent interview.
“They need to stop that flood water from even entering the city limits and it’s disappointing where we are right now. There have been a number of factors contributing to that.”
One of those factors, said Leeds Binder, was political uncertainty in the aftermath of the flood. The Springbank offstream reservoir was announced as a potential option — along with a dry dam at McLean Creek and a diversion tunnel funnelling flood water from the Glenmore reservoir to the Bow — by Premier Alison Redford in 2013.
After Redford resigned in 2014, it was Premier Jim Prentice who gave the go-ahead to Springbank in the fall of that year. But Prentice’s Progressive Conservative government unexpectedly fell to Rachel Notley’s NDP in the spring 2015 election.
During that campaign, the New Democrats said they opposed the Springbank proposal in favour of the McLean Creek option. Shortly after taking office however, Notley said the government was open to reversing its position and, in the fall of 2015, Environment Minister Shannon Phillips announced that Springbank was a go, along with flood mitigation projects in Redwood Meadows and Bragg Creek.
“Often time, what you see from the outside does not survive contact with governing and what you see from the inside,” said Phillips in a recent interview.
Phillips said the new government’s review of all the analysis done showed there was less environmental impact from Springbank than the McLean Creek proposal, which would affect grizzly bear and native trout populations and other species at risk. The McLean Creek dam, which would require working on a fast-moving river, also presented much greater risk during construction while potentially providing less protection to Calgary, according to the province.
The Springbank project, located 15 kilometres west of Calgary, calls for the construction of a storage reservoir and a 4.5 kilometre diversion canal. Under the plan, the area remains dry at almost all times but in case of flood, the canal can be used to divert water into the reservoir, where up to 70.2 million cubic metres can be stored and then gradually released when the flood subsides.
According to the province, Springbank, in conjunction with the Glenmore reservoir, would be capable of storing water volumes equal to the 2013 flood.
But the Springbank plan came with one major problem from the start — staunch opposition from 22 landowners who would be required to give up their properties to allow the reservoir to be built. The province wants to negotiate a purchase but is also prepared to expropriate the land if deals can’t be reached.
Lee Drewry, of the group Don’t Dam Springbank, thinks the province has a better option in McLean Creek and both the PCs and NDP have wrongly rushed to embrace the Springbank option in an effort to show progress.
“It’s just not the best project. It should be the last resort, to expropriate private property when there’s Crown land that is available and would do a similarly good job protecting Calgary and would also protect Bragg Creek and Redwood,” said Drewry.
Perhaps even more significantly, Springbank also faces opposition from the Tsuut’ina Nation. Chief Lee Crowchild isn’t prepared to talk about what steps the First Nation might take to fight the project, but he wants talks with the federal and provincial governments, the City of Calgary and other stakeholders.
“Our needs are certainly about protecting our land, our economic involvement,” he said. “Essentially, if it goes through it could make our land kind of a swamp.”
Meanwhile, the estimated price tag for the project, originally a selling point for Springbank, has gone up from $263 million to $432 million due to increased engineering and land acquisition costs.
It also suffered a setback when the federal Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency rejected the province’s initial environmental review as insufficient. While that’s been resolved with a revamped submission and the CEAA has begun its technical review, that delay was one of the factors cited in the NDP government’s recent announcement that the Springbank timelines have been pushed back by 10 months.
That prompted criticism the government dropped the ball in its initial submission to Ottawa, a critique which Transportation Minister Brian Mason called “somewhat valid.”
Under the province’s best-case scenario, construction will start in 2019, with Springbank complete by 2022.
As the wrangling continues around the proposal for the Elbow River, the government is moving forward on finding the best option for the Bow. Last month, Phillips announced that the province had begun a feasibility study on three storage options for the Bow — a new Glenbow reservoir, a new Morley reservoir or an expansion of the Ghost River reservoir — with the results expected next year.
Phillips said the NDP moved quickly once assuming power in 2015 to form a working group to identify the choices now being considered.
“None of those options are going to be low-cost or easy. If it was easy, it would be done already,” she cautioned.
Since 2015 meanwhile, the province has distributed $190 million out of a pledged $531 million for long-term flood resilience, including mitigation projects to safeguard municipal infrastructure.
Among the major projects in Calgary are a flood barrier in Eau Claire and protections for water and sewage systems.
“We know that the city of Calgary is more resilient to a 2013-event now than they were in 2013. The same kinds of property damage, the scale of the crisis, would not be the same with the same level of rainfall,” said Phillips.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he thinks there are opportunities to move faster on the smaller-scale mitigation projects.
He’d also like to see both the Springbank project and a plan for the Bow River further along but “it’s hard for me to imagine how we would have done that.”
Nenshi said what’s crucial is that Springbank goes ahead.
“It cannot fall through,” said Nenshi
“It does impact some people, that’s true, some people who’ve been on that land for a really long time. But the ratio of the number of people impacted versus the number of people protected, hundreds of thousands of people in Calgary plus the downtown core, is really extremely compelling.”
As Calgarians, we have just come through one of the most difficult economic times in a generation.
It is easy to forget that five years after the flooding that brought our city to its economic knees, we remain vulnerable to another devastating flood.
Taking action on flood mitigation in Calgary these days feels a lot like trying to get a pipeline built in this country — a frustratingly slow process due in part to unnecessary delays.
Calgarians need to demand that their city be protected from inevitable flooding on both the Elbow and Bow rivers, and make the case for governments to take decisive, timely action for the greater public good.
The terrible flooding across Canada again this spring should be a reminder of the threat posed each year to our city and the second-leading business centre in the country.
A few more hours of rain in 2013, and the entire downtown core would have flooded. The impact of businesses not returning in that scenario would have had severe economic consequences to the entire city.
Since then, putting in place flood-mitigation infrastructure that is essential to our safety, our homes and our economy, simply hasn’t been a big enough priority.
The solutions remain far from certain and are still years from completion — at least five more years of exposure on the Elbow and a decade or more on the Bow.
The latest regulatory delay came in May. It means the most cost-effective and least-disruptive option for the Elbow, the Springbank Off- Stream Reservoir, will be pushed back almost a year.
Barring any further delays, it’s now scheduled to be completed late in 2022. Preliminary assessment of options for the Bow have only just begun.
It should never have dragged on for this long. We are all well aware that floods are the most common and expensive natural disasters.
After the waters from the Bow and Elbow rivers receded in 2013, the bill for one of the costliest natural disasters in Canadian history was a staggering $6 billion.
Calgarians collectively pledged to do everything possible to avoid a similarly devastating catastrophe.
The “come hell or high water” spirit that Calgarians demonstrated to quickly get the city back on its feet is the stuff of urban legend.
We rebounded quickly in 2013, but it would be far more challenging
A few more hours of rain in 2013, and the entire downtown core would have flooded. The impact of businesses not returning in that scenario would have had severe economic consequences to the entire city. Paul Battistella and Steve Allan
The ‘come hell or high water’ spirit that Calgarians demonstrated to quickly get the city back on its feet is the stuff of urban legend.
to do so today.
Many businesses wouldn’t have the ability to rebuild this time and our efforts to fill the 27 per cent of the now-vacant downtown office space would be futile.
It would be devastating to our economy and impact every Calgarian.
The Springbank option is a critical element of a comprehensive regional flood mitigation strategy, and a number of third-party studies have concluded it is the most cost-effective, environmentally sound and minimally disruptive option to reduce the risk of flooding on the Elbow River.
Despite the clear public interest, and backing from successive provincial governments, this vital project has been challenged and slowed by motivated opponents — a small group of private landowners.
We certainly appreciate their concerns, but they will be fairly compensated and public safety and the economic imperatives of all of Calgary must take priority.
We are asking Calgarians to support decisive action that makes progress on this critical infrastructure a clear priority and tell all levels of government the years of delays are putting us at unnecessary risk of a preventable disaster.