ICLR pushes for flood maps, consumer education on water damage

Aging infrastructure and climate change are contributing to water-related residential losses in Canada, but educating consumers is one way to mitigate those losses, suggests an official with the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR).

“People blame the city,” if their basement gets flooded, ICLR managing director Glenn McGillivray said Wednesday. “They don’t blame the province or the feds or anyone else or mother nature.”

He made his remarks at a presentation titled “Water: The New Fire,” at a luncheon in Toronto held by the Property Casualty Underwriters Club.

McGillivray recounted that in 2013, Canada experienced the costliest and third-costliest disasters in Canadian history within two weeks of each other.

Insured losses from the June floods in Alberta were last reported at $1.7 billion while losses from the July 8 rainstorm in the Toronto area were at least $850 million.

The Alberta floods pushed the 1998 ice storm to second place while the 2011 Slave Lake, Alta. wildfire — with $700 million in insured losses — dropped from second to fourth place, in the ranking of disasters in Canada by insured losses.

But most water losses, McGillivray suggested, are not from overland flooding.

“Overland flood is a problem but generally speaking when we have an overland flood in Canada, it’s five houses here, 10 houses there,” he said to an audience of about 80 at the Metropolitan Hotel just north of Toronto City Hall. “Very seldom do we have an event like in Calgary where you measure lost homes in the hundreds. The real problem is urban flooding. Those of you who write homeowner business, sewer backup, you will know exactly what I’m talking about.”

And many consumers are under the mistaken impression that when flooding occurs, something must be wrong with the municipal sewer system.

“What went wrong is you got 175 mm of rain in three hours, that’s what went wrong,” he said.

Last year, McGillivray said, he was watching a television news report of a residential basement that was flooded in The Beach neighbourhood of Toronto.

“There was this woman picking up stuff off her basement floor … she said, ‘I’ve had seven of these since 2005,’ and what is she doing about it? She’s getting her neighbours together to go and yell at the mayor.”

Instead, McGillivray suggested, homeowners should be looking at mitigation measures such as backwater valves, sump pumps and emergency backup power sources for those sump pumps.

“They have to start realizing if it’s their house they have to take the bull by the horns.”

Cities can add flood mitigation measures, McGillivray noted, citing as an example improvements to culverts near the Finch Avenue bridge over Toronto’s Black Creek. That bridge got washed out in August, 2005, during a rainstorm that caused about $600 million in insured losses.

“People don’t quite realize that to put a sewer system into the city of Toronto to handle these flood events would take up the entire (annual) gross domestic product of Canada,” he noted.

“As one expert put it at one of our talks, ‘We can do it. The cost would unbelievable. The destruction would be unbelievable, and we wouldn’t be able to afford schools or hospitals or anything like this.'”

ICLR is pushing the provinces to tighten building codes.

“We want backwater valves in new homes in Ontario we won’t stop until we get it,” he noted.

In Alberta, ICLR is pushing for the province to implement recommendations from a recently-published report that called for flood risk maps.

The report, titled “Provincial Flood Mitigation Report: Consultation and Recommendation,” was submitted in November 2006 by George Groenveld, then a Member of the Legislative Assembly. It was not made public until this year.

ICLR is calling on Alberta to implement all 18 recommendations in the Groenveld report, which recommended a completion of flood risk maps for the identified urban flood risk areas in the province, a notification system “that will inform any potential buyer that the property is located within a designated flood risk area” and a cessation of sale of crown lands in known flood risk areas.

“We would like to see them go as far as to buy out homes that are in the immediate floodway and refuse financial assistance to people who refuse to leave those very highly dangerous areas,” McGillivray added.