Regina gets C-minus for flood prep
A study of Canadian cities’ flood preparedness has given Regina a C-minus, but the city is defending its emergency plans.
Regina ranked 13 out of 15 municipalities in a report from the University of Waterloo’s environment faculty.
“I don’t think the C-minus is representative of the level of preparedness the city has got. You really do have to contextualize this report,” said Ernie Polsom, Regina’s director of fire and protective services.
He pointed to the higher risks of flooding for some of the study’s other participants, like Calgary, Whitehorse and Winnipeg. The primary water risk Regina faces, Polsom said, is with rainstorm events.
But Kim Irving, president of the emergency preparedness company ERMC, said “the discipline of being prepared needs to be the focus,” regardless of a municipality’s risk profile.
In the study, Regina scored well in areas like flood plain mapping, land use planning and transportation systems.
It faltered, however, when it came to urban drainage maintenance, water supply and raw waste management.
Despite that, Polsom praised the city’s storm water and waste water master plans. He also pointed to ongoing work to improve drainage in neighbourhoods and the new waste water treatment plant.
Regina also received poor scores, along with many other cities, in areas like electricity, petroleum and food supply, and telecommunications and financial systems. The report says cities argued those areas aren’t under their purview or said co-ordination with the relevant organizations has proven challenging.
“It did surprise me a little bit,” researcher Blair Feltmate said of that finding.
He called items like drainage or flood mapping “lowhanging fruit that many cities focus on, but what we wanted to do was go beyond that. We said, basically, what we’re doing is visualizing an environment whereby a major flood has occurred: What are the things that a city needs to have up and running or functioning to (maintain) its overall ability to function?”
Feltmate said while some of the factors that were scored aren’t the direct responsibility of cities, municipalities should take the reins on collaboration with other relevant bodies.
In an email, the Ministry of Government Relations said communities “take the lead role of planning, preparing and responding to a flood or other disaster.”
That said, the province supports municipalities through training, expertise, information and resources. It also co-ordinates responses from provincial organizations. The provincial government legislates certain flood-related community planning requirements, too.
Irving also called collaboration “critical.”
Polsom said the city does partner with others frequently. The city is coordinating an emergency exercise this year, pulling together two emergency operations centres and planning a mass notification system.
“So I’m very confident in the overall plans,” Polsom said. “I think (the researchers) just asked the wrong people the questions for what those plans would entail.”
One final bit of advice Feltmate had for cities was not to get caught up in endless studies, what he refers to as “analysis paralysis” or “relentless pursuit of meaningless perfection.”
“An awful lot of this stuff we can be acting upon now; we don’t need any more data,” he said. “Just get on with it.”