The July flooding - This is what we have to live with, plan for and get an idea of what it is all going to cost.

By Pepper Parr

April 16th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

Part 3 of a 4 part series on what City Council had to say about the July floods.

The content from the Council meeting  has been edited for clarity and length.

In the two previous articles there wasn’t all that much of a focus on what the city was doing in this part Council and staff open up – a much deeper look at the problem and the solutions that are going to be needed.

Mayor Meed Ward asks CAO Hassaan Basit “ Do you have any estimate of the cost of this to the city in terms of what there the in the way of at the moment cost, and  then the future costs and whether that will start to approach a threshold where we can apply as a city for some relief through the provincial programs that are municipally based.

Basit: Those costs are still being accumulated and tracked right now. We don’t have, I’m not aware of an approximate number to date that that we can share, but we will be able to report back on that.

Mayor Meed Ward: The provincial disaster relief folks were in Burlington talking to individual residents, and there’s a whole separate program to assist residents which has more substantive resources than the city does, of course. Do we know when the province will make a determination? Do we know how much individuals might get, or the total amount and is there any kind of role for the city in that, or we just wait and see? Is there an advocacy role? Is there anything that that we can do to add to the data already are provided; for example, around what we’ve we’ve heard to help them, help our residents

Basit: The data gathering process is solely based, well, not solely based, it’s, it’s significantly based on the damage assessment which have been undertaken, and then their own approval process is. From what I understand talking to staff, it is an internal process that can take several days – maybe a little longer. We’ve had a long, long weekend sine the event as well. We do not have a firm date on when we are going to get an answer.

Meed Ward: Will  they let us know, or is this directly between the province and the residents, like, what do we have any line of sight into? What if any relief they’ve provided.

Basit: They will definitely let us know. They don’t have a notification process that they follow, but out of courtesy, they will certainly let us know in advance of that.

Mayor Meed Ward: And once you know, you’ll let us know. Okay.

Councillor Bentivegna: I want to go back to the priorities of the 100 locations that were brought up. Will councillors know where those priorities are?  I’m not sure if we’re going by areas of flooding, on one street and it was going downhill in an area that had a bit of a down slope. Will we know what those priorities are, and do we have some input on that?

Enrico Scalera: Director of Roads Parks and Forestry (referred toas Rico)  For clarity, those are 100 locations that identified over a very short time frame early in the flooding. There are is going to be many more locations to be identified. I wouldn’t say those are prioritized, I would say they are identified areas where we either have debris within the flood plain of the creek or that we have infrastructure concerns.

The creek inspections are still ongoing. When that is finished we begin the process of prioritizing: anything immediate and urgent will be dealt with right away. There will have to be a more wholesome review and report on all the infrastructure damage and all the debris locations that are necessary to be cleaned up from this event. So there’s going to be a lot more than 100 locations.

Council member: I’ve had conversations with the storm water people: is that going to include the flow of storm water, or water coming from the rural area, from the NEC area that impact some of these creeks as well. When is that information going to be communicated to us?

RICO: That work is being coordinated through our Engineering Department.

Council member: Some of the feedback I’m getting from some of the residents is they couldn’t find the application. And I know they had to go through 311, and they understood that there was one. A resident filled out the application on July 26;  I got that email yesterday saying that I haven’t heard back? Does someone communicate back to the resident once they send the application ?

Rico: The initial application did not give any sort of guidance –  our communications did not give any sort of guidance as to when you might hear or should they follow up to confirm receipt. We quickly realized that we needed to modify our communications plan on that and now that information is out there, with respect to on our website and with respect to our social media. Once you’ve submitted the application, sit tight, we’ll get back to you. You shouldn’t expect a confirmation of receipt. The reason for that is that our staff resourcing, we wanted to make sure that we were processing the applications, as opposed to answering calls about having we received your application, so that information is now out there.

We have processed a significant number of applications, and we’re holding on another pile of applications, waiting to get the inspection confirmations from the region. Bottom line we just haven’t received the criteria confirmation clearance yet.

So we ask those residents to sit tight  –  We continue to process applications based on the information we’re receiving from the region.

Council member: If  we get other emails, do we contact someone as a councillor, if they have not heard back? And where do we do that? How would we do that?

Rico: Service Burlington is now dealing with those requests.

Councillor Nissan: With respect to capital projects, do we expect to have anything ready in time for the budget cycle in terms of what our needs may be on the capital side, where there’s obvious or evident justification for an improvement to our to our sewage  system?

Scott Hamilton, Director of Engineering: There may be some plan works that are still in process. We have already been doing an ongoing capital  inspection program of our storm sewers and creeks,  those projects are already in our capital forecast. Based on the July floods , we’ll probably look at how we could expedite some of those projects or reprioritize some.

You will see projects come forward in the upcoming capital budget submission that will help alleviate some of these.  There’ll still be more coming with further investigation. Scott will be looking at any potential new areas, any new pain points that capital funding may be applied to.

Nisan: Do you think you’ll be able to do that all by budget cycle?

Scott Hamilton: We won’t have an exhaustive list, but we’ll have a good start.  There’s a lot of permitting and other design work that’s required these projects. We can get that kind of money earmarked so it does buy us time for the come back in the future capital, if they’re not in this capital in the fall.

Mayor Meed Ward:  I just would like to know if there’s going to be a needs analysis that will show us okay, based on what we’ve learned, here are the needs we have in the city, and the plan to sort of attack those needs.

Scott Hamilton: The analysis that I was referring to earlier, will result in some recommendations, those that we can reasonably glean and make from that analysis. That’s the intention. That’s kind of what you’re asking. What you know  will help us reprioritize. They already have some data on the engineering side, which they’re working on to reprioritize capital works, projects that we can fix quickly, and see some quick wins that you’re going to see in the budget that will help alleviate certain known pain points. You don’t need to do a deep analysis on everything. Some things were quite obvious, you know, as a result of the July storm. And we know we’re going to fix those. And those you’ll see very quickly, the other ones that get into the medium term, the longer term, the systemic issues you know, that will form a large part of that analysis report.

Basit: I know this can be frustrating, but we do need to do some studies. Councillor Bentivegna’s  question about understanding watershed based flows and things like that. It’ll be a mixed bag of short term, immediate, long term, capital works, operational capacity, procedural changes. There’s a lot that’s going to come out of this. That is the lens I’d like to put on this. The senior team is going to need some time. You’re going to see what we think is reasonable and will help the situation come within this budget cycle. Some things may take longer because it was a multi faceted  set of circumstances that caused this. We  need to understand and ensure that we’re deploying financial resources very, very smartly, efficiently, but where we are actually going to solve problems.

Councillor Sharman:  The relationship between the Region the sanitary sewers and the stormwater sewers are pretty profoundly intertwined. This is a very lengthy thought process. As I look at areas that re-flooded in 2024 versus in 2014 – we discover is that bunch of houses that took the remedial actions of putting the backwater valve, a sump pump, the disconnecting weeping tiles, etc, etc. They did fine, but the neighbours who did the same things didn’t.

So that raises the questions as to, what we know about the relationship between and  what degree are we working with the Region in order to try to figure out, to your point, there’s an awful lot of analysis, because what changed was systematic  – the sewers worked. Except, of course, there was a lot more rain. There were individual circumstances, house by house, that are dramatically different. We  need to understand the why.

Sharman: Are you going to be working with the region on that?

Basit: The Region have  been exceptional partners, very responsive. They’re carrying the bulk of administration and all of the intakes.

We have given whatever support we could offer,  a few that are on the agenda later. Our grant application process, the culture  – the intent was to get right with people.  Putting together  a program  very, very quickly, you’re not going to cover every scenario. I you hear of someone who’s not sure if they qualify that or they’ve very unique situation, have them call Service Burlington. We have white glove service,  a staff person who will help them navigate. The answer may be no, we may be directing them to other resources, but we’re not going to frustrate people. So in that regard, the cooperation with the Region has been great. We need to continue that. I have spoken to my counterpart at the Region; this analysis needs to be done jointly. We do need to understand what happened.

Council member:  You asked if it’s complex – clearly, it is. We need to understand it. I know from some conversations with the region’s engineering staff, that backflow valves  need some sort of maintenance. How were they installed? Were they maintained? Will the Region do that kind of forensic level work? Clearly there was something different. We do need to do this together. If we are not collaborating going forward, because to the residents, it doesn’t matter who’s providing the service. What matters is how this roles out. We  need to understand what the natural system did throughout all of this. Where did the creeks stay confined to where they act unpredictably? There are three sort of entities that need to come together and work on this together.

Basit: I agree totally. And just thinking about that, two aspects of water running downhill,  on one particular road, people kept saying, well, you’re building all these houses in the north. And I went and got the plan for  the sewer pipes under the ground and they are not connected to anybody but people in their own neighborhood. But the fact of the matter is, the water runs down the hill and as it gets to an intersection – what happens is the pressure of the water coming down the hill is greater than the water that’s trying to come in from the other side of the intersection, so the water is going up the intersection and flooding the homes on there.

There’s an issue that gets us into sewage, it’s storm water in those sewage pipes that have caused this, and that gets us to the creeks. On the same street there is a creek running down the back. Some of those homes have put in sump pumps –  the creeks come up and now they’re supercharging or surcharging the sump pumps. And sump pumps are pumping water out into the hole onto the backyard, where they’re already flooded, and so they’re just pumping the water around, around, around.  We clearly have some hydraulic engineering questions that need to be answered.

Council member: Will we be able to get into that kind of depth of analysis?

Basit: I think it’s a question that maybe Scott needs to weigh in on –  I will say this: just because we had flooding doesn’t mean something was broken. The short answer your question is; some of these problems will always exist because we design everything. The creeks can have an endless floodplain where nobody lives and is allowed to do anything, in which case nobody will flood if a creek floods. Every system, the roads, the sewage system, houses, building codes, grading people who there were people, residents, you know, reached out who have, who did everything right, almost over engineered, you know, their backyards with tile drainage and every they still flooded because the storm event in that neighborhood exceeded the design standard for every mitigation that was put in.

It’s as  simple as that – , which gets you into climate change.

And I think one of your earlier questions Councillor Sharman was are we looking at design standards like parking lots, drainage and things like that. In some cases other orders of government set the standards. as well, for the province to look at standards. What is our risk?

One of my counterparts in Toronto asked:  why do we still call it the one in 100 year storm? The frequency has increased dramatically.

This is what we have to live with, plan for and get an idea at least of what it is all going to cost.