Part 1: Understanding what happened and gathering data.

By Pepper Parr

April 12th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Part 1 of a 4 part series.

Council was to hear from Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Hassaan Bait on what the city now knew about the July 15th and 16th flooding that seriously damaged a number of homes in the city – most of which were in the ward 3 area.

Hassaan Basit started with explaining how the Burlington $1000 Ex Gratia grant has been rolling out noting that as of that date there were 218 applications.

Briefing notes show that the majority of the grants are being paid out by Halton Region. I think the count of homes was at 14to 15 thousand homes that had some level of flooding.

Basit described the payments process as extremely efficient; many in the community would differ with him on that.

Hassaan Basit: Chief Administrative Officer (CAO)

He pointed out that a significant number of staff were deployed from their other tasks, from legal, finance and communications. It was certainly not an ideal situation.  I’m quite pleased at how quickly and efficiently things have been rolling out.

The funnelling of information from Council members who were out in the community. You were sometimes the first point of contact for a lot of residents, because they know your names out there.

We were able to operationalize them, prioritize them; it was a triage function.

Basit answered the question he felt was out in the community:  How come you’re not bringing up specific properties and locations at this meeting? It’s because you’re bringing them up with us the minute you receive them and we’re responding to all of those and we’ll continue to do that adding that “there’s been great collaboration, and we appreciate all of that.”

We have staff on  line, if there are any other questions about this matter. But without further ado, I’d like turn to turn it over to Enrico (Rico) Scalera, Director of Roads, Parks and Forestry Department

Enrico (Rico) Scalera, Director of Roads, Parks and Forestry Department

Rico: I want to give you an update on our storm response activities to date. At our last update from July 19, just a few days after the events of July 15 and 16th. Since then we have been focused on incident response; clearing of storm infrastructure to ensure conveyance of impacted services and facilities. We have also started the damage assessment process today –  most facilities and services have been restored. We do continue to inspect storm infrastructure, remove debris, flush sewers, review creeks and channels. We continue to respond to drainage related inquiries, including meeting with residents in reviewing their concerns, explaining how the storm system works and functions. We look  for opportunities for future improvements as we move forward. In addition to all that  our Community Management Coordinator has  been working relentlessly in following up with both internal and external parties to ensure effective coordination and reporting of responses. Multiple departments involved in this incident response.

I do want to provide some context. We have had, to date, 24 emergency response calls by the fire department, mostly on that first day; we responded to 2025, road related closures that were necessary. We’ve had five traffic signal outages, all of which that were rectified within a within a couple days. We’ve had multiple locations of road shoulder washouts with the repairs ongoing, two construction projects were impacted with one separate road segment that still requires major repairs. We responded  to 70 forestry storm requests. Ten of our park facilities have been impacted with temporary amenity closures. Most of these have been reinstated. 11 recreation facilities were impacted including the Tyandaga golf course.

Debris Removal is ongoing at major culvert, inlet and outlet. . We’ve visited over 100 locations. We’ve collected over 10 large dump trucks of debris to date. Street sweeping is ongoing. We’ve installed temporary local traffic only signage in one of the high impact areas to limit unwanted traffic. Creek inspections are underway, and we’re identifying locations for follow up, both on debris collection as well as infrastructure related repairs.

With respect to that, we are also continuing to coordinate with our Region and Conservation Halton staff, as well as other stakeholder agencies and over of private storm system linkages, in order to determine how we can work together on response activities, and also ensure that they are aware of our expectations for more proactive storm maintenance activities moving forward.

We continue to work with highway 407, ETR and the Ministry of Transportation as wellas reaching out to railway authorities. Dealing with elevated anxiety levels calls for different responses; we  are doing what we can to mitigate their concerns.  That’s the end of my update, and happy to answer any questions.

Councillor Angelo Bentivegna

Councillor Bentivegna :  First of all, I want to say thank you to you and your staff. I know everyone’s been hard at work trying to get everything done. If you look at the graph of the floodings in in the city – ward 6 had 22. Some would say – you guys did okay. I want to get into the communication aspect of it. How do we make sure that the communication within the region so people who called 311 for help.

I have talked to many of the the residents who say they the city as well. How do we make sure that the communication is open

?. What happened in the Headon and Forest Drive area where there was three feet of water that only affected 12 of the homes in that area.  Good Samaritans came out with shovels and rakes to clear a  creek that overflowed to 14 feet, and they didn’t see a city worker that day. The communication somehow fell through the cracks  and I want to make sure we’re all aware of it so that we can move forward and deal with that communication aspect of it.

I don’t have all the answers. I know we’re going to meet with residents and go through it. There was a person who was going to delegate today but is so stressed out they did not delegate. I have a 21 page document that includes photographs of what was happening at about every half hour to a home.

The damage is unbelievable.

Mayor Meed Ward responds saying that exactly what the report back in the fall is going to do.

Rico responds saying  we are still reviewing that incident. We did not get any cases in our inner system. It appears that there is  a bit of an uncertainty with respect to jurisdictional boundaries

Our service people are in ongoing discussions with Halton 311 staff in order to improve how calls get routed and handled. Interesting enough, even though we didn’t formally register any calls through Service Burlington on the Monday, we did have staff show up somehow to that location later on in the day. Unfortunately it  wasn’t as timely as we would have liked. We are reviewing how that occurred.

S the Mayor has pointed out it is important totake all this data, all these incidents, and better understand them and work with our Regional partners, to see how we can mitigate this going forward.

Councillor Paul Sharman

Councillor Sharman: With respect to the creek that overflowed, it is in an area that is somewhat hidden. There are homes in front of this creek that face Headon and Forest drive, but there are no homes in behind is only a church, and there is a street that would be considered to be a crescent, and I’m not sure in terms of the maintenance schedule and so on. But how do we ensure that it’s on our radar and that we’re moving forward? It gets dealt with, probably sooner rather than later, because of its location that is somewhat hidden?

Enrico (Rico) Scalera, Director of Roads, Parks and Forestry Department: We know and are now well aware of the service gaps

Rico: We will, we continue to look at our services. We know and are now well aware of the service gaps – how they occurred and how to mitigate them. These are things that we need to look at and learn to understand.

Councilor Nissan:  I just wanted to get a little more detail from you. You mentioned 100 locations that you are reviewing. What are you reviewing for, and what would be the next steps? I mean, how long will it take to get to 100 locations? So we are we reviewing? Creek stretches that are primarily in the areas that that were affected or are we  also responding to service requests?  Are we responding  to maybe merchant needs that come up through our engineering division that are that are involved in these creek inspections.

Rico: We inspecting creeks through our forestry department in order to sort of help out. The 100 locations that I’ve identified is only part of the of the necessary response that’s available. It does include debris removal, and it also includes restoration of some of the infrastructure that’s been damaged.

There are retaining walls within our creek systems that have experienced some erosion. We still need to do all the high priority emergent areas that are identified.

Once we have the data and have a planned unstructured approach we know how to do this effectively; some of that will be done internally and  some of the work is actually contracted out.

Councillor Nisan: “I want to know how quickly your staff have actually come out to evaluate, to see what went on, to see if there were blockages.”

Nisan: So beyond the creek ways  there’s numerous sort of pinch points, and in ward three, where you begin to see the pattern where residents are reaching out and I want to know how quickly in several cases, your staff have actually come out to evaluate, to see what went on, to see if there were blockages. In one case it was evident that there was no blockage, but that the capacity of the of the sewer wasn’t enough to carry the water. Could, could you, or Hassaan me  up to date on this before the budget cycle? How we’re going to address those cases? Because I think there may be a lot of them in my ward.

Rico: I’ll start first, and then the City Manager can add in. We’re in the gathering of the information process. We already have a comprehensive inspection and maintenance support program for our storm sewer infrastructure in place. There certainly are opportunities that we can enhance that. The fall report will  determine, from a priority perspective, what we feel we would like to address as part of the budget process.

Hassaan Bait: So just to build on what Rico said, I think we need to wait for our analysis, and that analysis needs to occur in partnership with the Region of Halton because the systems are combined.

I am not saying it is an issue – but the  intake system is owned and managed by the Region. The response on the street level is the responsibility of the local municipality. Can that work? Yes, it can, you know, we demonstrated that. Was it ideal? No. So, you know, there’s so many areas of debrief that need to occur.

They’re not just the the engineering related ones. They’re not just the infrastructure related ones. In other words, they’re communication ones, how the structure is set up between intake, you know, during an event, dispatch, all of those things. We need to  wait for the analysis to tease apart the issues. Flooding was caused by two or three different reasons across the city, it wasn’t one. Even when you see a creek overflow – in many cases it did because the culvert it was crossing had gotten clogged up.

It’s not a riverine system that’s built over. It’s where a riverine system is intersecting with a storm water system. We have to look at these. That’s why Rico’s team right now going site by site, analyzing that synopsis or summary that you referenced councillor, that you sent to me as well. And that’s invaluable. It’s minute by minute. It’s with photographs that residents took; that’s the kind of analysis that needs to occur. It’s extremely helpful. We need to wait for until there is more of that kind of information is available.

Part 2 of this 4 part series:

“Our Emergency Preparedness – it isn’t good enough.”

 

 

 

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2 comments to Part 1: Understanding what happened and gathering data.

  • Joe Gaetan

    Fiasco.

  • Michael Hribljan

    Simple question, what is the basic design standard for our storm water management systems?

    How many millimeters of rainfall in a given time frame is our system designed to handle?

    Keeping in mind that in 1954 we had 200 mm of rain in a 24 hour period, when I was an practicing engineering consultant that was the standard we used along with an appropriate instantaneous rainfall factor.

    Lots like to point to climate change, yet the records for July 15 and 16 did not exceed a 1 in 100 year event.