Building Noah’s Ark

The promise of spring showers turned into a sodden reality when intense rainfall in Thunder Bay, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec overwhelmed city infrastructure, resulting in widespread flooding and a raft of insurance claims.

The initial estimate is that the flooding caused $200 million in insured damage, reports James Geuzebroek, vice president of communications for Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), referencing figures from PSC-Canada. Over four days, the swath of rain touched various parts of Ontario and Quebec, with the Lake Superior region and areas in and around Montreal experiencing the brunt of the storm.

Environment Canada reported that the May 29 deluge in Montreal – the city was battered by 47 millimetres of rain, about two-thirds of that in 15 minutes – had a return period of 1 in 100 years. Days earlier, on May 26-27, Thunder Bay was pelted by 91 mm of rain over a period of about 18 hours.

In Montreal, overwhelmed systems resulted in flooding of residences, businesses and roadways. In Thunder Bay, flooding arising from a severe sewage backup prompted the city to declare a state of emergency.

“There were a lot of homeowners with really nasty sewer backup issues and they were upset, understandably,” says Geuzebroek, who was in Thunder Bay as part of IBC’s deployment of its Community Assistance Mobile Pavilion. IBC set up camp in an especially hard-hit area beside the sewage treatment facility.

“At first glance, it looked like everyone was having a yard sale,” Geuzebroek reports. Homeowners had retrieved their belongings from flooded basements and piled them up at the curb. “You could see hoses coming out of many of the basements where they were working on draining the water out,” he says.

SAME OLD STORY

Canada’s home and business insurers are seeing more water-related claims, notes Telling the Weather Story, a report prepared for the IBC by Professor Gordon McBean and colleagues at the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR). “These losses are driven in part by Canada’s aging sewer infrastructure, which is often incapable of handling the new, higher levels of precipitation.”

The tale of the two floods may be spun into a yarn of future woe if municipalities do not take steps to get their infrastructure houses in order. Extreme rain events may not be the norm, but they are decreasingly an exception.

Many municipalities have systems that “are not adequate for increased precipitation that we’re already getting as a result of climate change and that we can expect to get in the future,” Geuzebroek says.

“Return periods that we use for infrastructure may not reflect actual return periods for storms we’re seeing,” adds Dan Sandink, ICLR’s manager of resilient communities and research. “In that case, we’re not prepared in a lot of ways.” If the goal is to design systems for a 1 in 100 year event, he advises that “we need to take into account the changing frequency of extreme rainfall in order to provide that public protection.”

Montreal’s mayor was quoted as saying no sewer collector network would have been able to manage the water that pummelled the city over so short a period. Sandink would likely agree. “It would cost too much money to design these systems to handle every single [rainfall] event.”

Geuzebroek says the Municipal Risk Assessment Tool (MRAT), which is now being piloted in several municipalities, may be able to help. MRAT collects municipal infrastructure data, claims data and climatic data to create maps and identify infrastructure weaknesses, including areas that are most vulnerable to sewer backup and water damage.

Unfortunately, “usually communities and individuals don’t take very substantial action until after they’ve experienced events,” Sandink says.

BEYOND PHYSICAL

Action certainly happened too late for a group of plaintiffs who have filed a claim against the Corporation of the City of Thunder Bay. Part of the claim, which contains statements that have not been proven in court, turns on the state and management of municipal infrastructure.

The claim filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on June 21 names plaintiffs representing a class of persons who owned or occupied property in the city on or after May 28, 2012, and who suffered damages and injuries as a result of flooding and sewer backup. The plaintiffs are seeking “$320 million in damages, plus any costs, and may well be increased as the true extent of this disaster becomes known,” Alexander Zaitzeff, a lawyer with Watkins Law Professional Corporation, notes on the firm’s website.

It is alleged the city is strictly liable for damages resulting from its activities, including but not limited to, its defective sewage system, and the operation and maintenance of sewage treatment facilities and related infrastructure. A court must approve the claim before it can proceed as a class action.

Sandink says that it will be interesting to see what comes from the lawsuit since one contention being reported is that the system failed, not simply that a

system was overwhelmed.

“Insurers have seen a very definite increase in water damage,” Geuzebroek observes, citing $1.7 billion in water damage claims for insurers for last year. “Our message to federal, provincial and municipal governments is that they need to invest more in that invisible infrastructure.”

The allegations contained in the plaintiffs’ action move beyond physical damage to potential harm to health. The discharge of sewage resulted in “contaminating their homes, personal property and the atmosphere of the plaintiffs’ homes with offensive, nauseous, unhealthy and potentially toxic odours, bacteria, parasites and mould,” the statement of claim notes.

Mould was on the radar for adjusters from Cunningham Lindsey Canada Claims Services Ltd. who responded to Thunder Bay. Adjuster investigations “will include identifying any possible mould implications that may result,” Mike Morris, the company’s vice president of national operations, said at the time.

SHUTTING DOWN

Measures can be taken at both the municipal and homeowner levels to try to mitigate damage in the event of sewer backups. A properly installed backwater valve automatically closes if sewage back ups from the main sewer, thereby preventing sewage from reaching residential basements, notes an information sheet from IBC. Backwater valves must be placed so that “sewage backup will be stopped short of other water outlets in the basement, such as sinks, toilets, showers and laundry tubs,” the information adds.

That seems to have been an issue in Montreal, where there were reports of water bursting up through toilets and sinks, and certainly in Thunder Bay. “Everybody loses if the mess stays for any extended period of time,” Geuzebroek says.

One positive from the recent events, Sandink suggests, may be that “there is generally a window of opportunity after flood events occur when both political and public interest is high, when people are looking for solutions, when the disaster event is still on their minds. That period can be leveraged to implement risk reduction measures.”