By Pepper Parr
August 19th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
Part 4 of a 4 part series.
The content of this Council meeting has been edited for clarity and length.
Chief Administrative Officer City of Burlington: Hassaan Basit
Hassaan Basit, Chief Administrative Officer: I do want to caution everybody and say we may find out what happened and at the same time realize we may not be able to fix all of it because the storm event simply exceeded all reasonable standards of design.
Councillor Paul Sharman’s visceral need for data may finally have been met.
Councillor Sharman: If I can follow up on that, if I may, because I think the issue is data; We can’t follow up, we don’t do the analysis which raises questions about the way in which we’re remediating the creeks, because we’re doing it from the north going south, instead of going from the south going up, which means that the water is bottle necking on the way.
Have I got that right? Could we reverse that?
Mayor Meed Ward: That is a question for Scott. I will say there are sections of the storm water system that are more accessible than others. There are also sections that are in private hands – there are a lot of factors. I’m going to let Scott speak to this.
Scott Hamilton, Director of Engineering: We do look at the downstream and first work back up. It’s not always from south to north or north to south. It’s where the ball is. There are are bridges that flooded in 2014 – they didn’t flood this event. They were functioning because we tackled the lower end first and worked our way back up;
We always try and tackle the one that’s going to be the worst pinch point. The restriction of that flow, and work around that, we try and go south to north.
With respect to your question about the grading and the design – we are looking at the design standards that came come out of the 2014 flood of how we regularly update our rain intensity curves, which we used to design and use to develop within the city of Burlington, and they are being updated.
Residents looking for catch basins they can clear to allow the water to drain away.
We’re going to look at those this year to see we can update that to make it more to gather more these one in 100 or one storms that aren’t are more frequent than they used to be. So I think that’ll help us a lot.
I know you’re you’re big on the data and the metrics. But one key thing that came out of this event, and what we’ve been struggling with, is is a private ownership. So a lot of these conveyance or creeks are they have to go through some some private ownership that isn’t city owned land. Those are trickier for us to get into and maintain or to keep clear. The encroachments we’ve dealt with in the past – where residents encroach onto those those Creek blocks and create some things. So we are going to look at that as part of that report that’s coming the fall, of things that we can kind of do to to help get the system to design the way it was supposed to.
We can design something for a certain way then things change and then we don’t always control that. We’re looking at ways to mitigate those impacts that design well.
The intensive Q&A between Council members and staff was coming to a close. “We could all talk a lot about this” said Sharman. And indeed he did.
The meeting came to a close with nothing to approve other than that a verbal update took place.
Related news stories:
The City is still working through the priorities from the 2017 report by Amec Foster Wheeler on the 2014 Flood. Very few have been completed to date – 7 years later.
Perhaps a reorganization of priorities in City spending?
Interesting, Hidden Valley in West Aldershot (Lemonville/Howard Road) was completely flooded from this storm and the creeks-tributaries had signifient repairs completed a few years ago. This area is owned by the City and the only changes in this area was widening Waterdown road. Makes me ask if there should be some changes to the Aldershot MSTA Plans.
You dont need a secret decoder ring, or “data” to alert you to the fact that in the final “analysis” based on the anecdotal observation of your basement flooding that it may be time to sell your home in the affected areas.
A few interesting points in this article:
1) Design standards – The Auditor General has pointed out in her report of 2022 that the Province has not updated its stormwater guidelines to account for climate change. This came to light at the OLT hearing. The developer’s engineers advised that they only have to do what is required by the province -even if it won’t meet the needs of climate change. The Province continues to enable development while purposefully ignoring flood mitigation measures. The report is telling.
2) The suggestion of private ownership issues was also raised at the OLT hearing for Millcroft. The City could use the system of stormwater ponds that currently retain water before it heads downstream however they don’t have control of this land and creek system. It was determined in the Dillon study of 1977 that “the Appleby Creek is not suitable for an offline pond because it is a narrow and lengthy watershed.”
3) There is a large focus here on riverine flooding that accounts for only 3% of flooding in Ontario. The other 97% is due to urban flooding caused by overdevelopment, antiquated infrastructure, land use decisions. A lack of greenspace to absorb the stormwater rather than have it runoff all the hardened structures is becoming a bigger issue. The City is allocating an ever increasing amount of land to stormwater ponds – a single purpose use and not so pretty. The dual purpose parkland/stormwater features seem much more attractive to a growing population where multipurpose land use could be more economical for the City.
Once the problem is analyzed and understood it can be fixed.
The City may not be able to afford the cost of fixing it. We have sent men to walk on the surface of the moon. This isn’t rocket science its just plumbing.