There are ways we can break the flood pattern

Three themes: Don’t build on flood plains, fix insurance, take personal responsibility

After the tears and the heartbreak, and even as flood-ravaged communities focus on recovery and rebuilding, it is important to take a hard look at what we can do as a society to prevent disaster when the next flood hits — as it will.

Often, when such a natural disaster occurs, we rally around affected communities and help them through the painful process of recovery and rebuilding. Then everybody moves on until the next strike, and we repeat the same pattern without ever thinking seriously of what preventive measures we can take to stop the vicious cycle of destruction and rebuilding.

The reason is simple: Because of the belief that massive floods happen in 50- or 100-year cycles, there’s no sense of urgency in finding long-term solutions. If you live in Gatineau and experienced the last great flood in 1974, you are less inclined to commit resources to long-term mitigation measures when you think the next one might not happen for another 40 years. The same goes for government. But we now know that global warming increases the risk, frequency and intensity of heavy storms that trigger floods, and we should act differently.

“We are going to have to understand that bracing for a 100-year storm is maybe going to happen every 10 years now, or every few years,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in Gatineau as he urged affected communities to “rebuild better.”

Rebuilding better, however, cannot happen in a vacuum.

It needs three principal actors — homeowners, governments and the insurance industry — to work together to create the best mitigation measures imaginable against flooding. And it starts with municipal governments.

It is town and city governments that approve developments, and they keep doing so on flood plains and wetlands because of the millions in property taxes they stand to collect. Communities in Ottawa have fought long, and often losing, battles with municipal governments over building on wetlands.

In one notorious case, the city bitterly fought one of its water engineers who complained of faulty modelling that could cause flooding in a Carp River watershed development. He was taken off the project, only for the city to acknowledge later that he was right. One sure way to avoid flood disasters in the future is to stop building on flood plains. Provincial governments must require this of municipal governments, and if they resist, they should be made to pay the cost of recovery and rebuilding if disaster strikes. Cities cannot continually reap the benefits of flood-zone development and, when the dam breaks, expect other governments to pick up the tab.

For homeowners, the big issue is lack of flood insurance. And even when it’s available, many cannot afford it. According to a University of Waterloo study, Canada, until about four years ago, was the only G8 country without overland flood insurance. The costs were just too much for the insurance companies. That is slowly changing, but the gap remains wide.

The 2012 study by Jason Thistlethwaite and Blair Feltmate of the university’s School of Environment, found that “lack of incentives for pre-disaster mitigation, investment in flood defences by governments and individuals, and inadequate development and enforcement of flood plain maps” are the major factors holding back the insurance industry. Federal and provincial governments certainly have the capacity to deal with these issues and it is time for them to open discussions with the industry and work out a solution.

Developers and homeowners have an important responsibility as well. If you choose to build or buy in a flood zone, fully aware of the inherent dangers, you should not expect to be bailed out any time there is a flood.

We are in a new era and municipalities must require developers to include flood defences and mitigation measures in future plans, and if those are not met, the projects should be rejected. Something similar should be required of buyers.

No one knows when the next big flood will come, and finding long-term solutions will take time and commitment. But if we start now, we might be better prepared to deal with the next deluge.