Canadians must adapt to increasing risk of flooding
Dawn Harp and Lars Androsoff were fully confident flooding didn’t threaten their home near southern B.C.’s Kettle River.
Then the couple awoke at 1:30 a.m. on May 11 to the sound of flood waters flowing beneath the floorboards in their Grand Forks home.
“I never thought this would happen in a million years,” said Androsoff, 42.
But climate-change researchers say this month’s B.C. floods, and the record-setting New Brunswick floods before them, are a glimpse into the future for people who live near Canada’s many rivers.
Residents who thought their homes were safe must either move to higher ground or take flood-proofing steps, while governments have to accelerate the creation of flood-risk maps and zoning rules, they say.
“The most recent flooding in New Brunswick and south-central British Columbia are reminders we can no longer ‘cheat the system’ on flood risk,” Blair Feltmate, who leads a federally appointed panel studying climate adaptation, said in an email. “Cheating has caught up to us.”
Harp, who is being treated for lung cancer, and Androsoff, a certified meat cutter at a local facility, had hoped a nearby dike would protect them when they bought their house seven years ago, but it was overcome by the rushing waters that surged through southern B.C.
The 45-year-old says if she’d have known the flood risk, she “wouldn’t have bought the home.”
Like most residents of the neighbourhood of North Ruckle, or the flooded areas of New Brunswick, they have no insurance for the loss of most of their possessions.
Feltmate says as the waters recede in B.C. and New Brunswick, it’s important that public attention stays focused on better preparation for the next round of rising waters — so fewer citizens like Androsoff and Harp are caught off-guard.
“Every day we don’t adapt is a day we don’t have,” says Feltmate, an environmental scientist and head of the Intact Centre of Climate Change at the University of Waterloo, which completed a 2016 study that showed just six per cent of 2,300 Canadians living in high-risk flood zones were aware of the potential devastation they faced.
Feltmate is among the advocates arguing there’s an urgent need for easily accessible, high-resolution, flood-risk maps that precisely point out potential damage to properties; zoning rules that strictly restrict developments in vulnerable areas; and help for residents to move or prepare.
Governments must move more swiftly on these and numerous other preventive measures, such as ensuring home inspectors are trained to recognize flood risk and warn homebuyers, he says.
For those caught in rising waters, the price is financially and emotionally devastating.
“I’d rather go through a fire than a flood,” said Androsoff. “I’ve been through the 1998 Salmon Arm (forest) fire when we had it and it was nothing compared to this ... With fire you can at least wet things down. Water is way worse. We couldn’t do anything.”