Post Malone had performed three songs at his July 25 tour stop at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium when the wind started to pick up and the sky darkened. Moments later, a rainstorm erupted, sparking chaos as more than 30,000 fans sought shelter.
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A short distance away, winds approaching eighty-five kilometres per hour and sheets of sideways rain pummelled the city’s annual KDays exhibition, forcing families to shelter in place.
Within an hour, the storm unleashed thirty millimetres of rain, causing torrents of water to run through low-lying neighbourhoods. On social media, footage quickly emerged of freeways and underpasses transformed into rivers and lakes, of iron manholes exploding into geysers, of stranded residents and flooded basements.
This was just one of several storms that walloped Edmonton over the course of several weeks, each leaving behind it a trail of destruction. By the end of July, the typically sunny city had accumulated more than 580 millimetres of rain, putting it in the running for the wettest summer in history. At the time, Edmonton officials estimated that this summer’s storms could cost the city between $20–$30 million to clean up, while accumulating some $230 million in insured damages.
Though shocking, what happened in Edmonton could be “a preview for every Canadian city,” according to Alireza Bayat, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Alberta, whose research focuses on underground infrastructure.
Just a few days after the Edmonton floods, several communities in the Niagara region woke up to flooded homes and destroyed crops following a series of localized downpours that dumped up to 146 millimeters of rain. In early August, Quebec was hit with torrential storms, causing widespread flooding and landslides and triggering a state of emergency for a portion of the Laurentians. And on September 2, Toronto was hit with a massive “hundred-year” thunderstorm that triggered extensive flooding and power outages.
Flooding has become the most common and costly climate disaster in Canada, according to the Canadian Climate Institute, affecting almost every region in the country and averaging nearly $800 million in insured damages each year. To make matters worse, Canadian cities—80 percent of which were at least partially built on floodplains—are aging and, in many cases, rely on infrastructure that was not built to withstand the deluges we see today.
Over the past decade, municipalities across Canada have ramped up their flood mitigation efforts. Major cities, including Edmonton, Calgary, and Toronto, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in projects designed to protect against extreme weather, building seawalls to brace against rising waters, engineering sophisticated drainage systems to divert floodwaters away from vulnerable communities, and expanding green spaces to absorb rainfall. Experts say these investments are beginning to pay off.
Jennifer Drake, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carleton University and an expert on stormwater management and green infrastructure, says the country’s doing a good job of preventing “the worst outcomes associated with floods”—specifically, loss of life.
“We have very good public policies in place to manage the floodplain and keep people from building in really dangerous areas,” she says. “And we have very strong flood prediction models and integrated strategies for managing emergency services.”
But can any city truly adapt to our new climate reality? Is any community truly fortified against the impacts of flooding? It’s impossible to know, at least until the next tempest arrives.
“There’s always a bigger storm,” Bayat warns. “And we cannot outbuild the sky.”
Flooding is a natural process, but it’s exacerbated by urbanization. Building cities not only involves paving over green spaces with concrete, asphalt, and other impervious surfaces but also digging up or altering creeks or waterways. Together, these processes degrade an environment’s natural ability to absorb water and to direct its movement.
Calgary’s spring 2013 floods are a catastrophic example of ravine flooding, in which snowmelt or heavy precipitation causes a river to spill over its banks. Heavy rain, combined with melting snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, triggered intense flooding in the region’s watersheds, including the Elbow and Bow Rivers. The flooding led to the deaths of five people and displaced over 100,000 residents.
