The , the lights went dark, the phones went down. Sirens echoed across the city as emergency calls suddenly tripled. from deluged nursing homes; firefighters wore life jackets as they extracted people from cars.
It was the “century storm”: the one-in-100-year rainfall that . Except, it hasn’t been a century since the last one. It hasn’t even been long enough to age a particularly sharp cheddar cheese.
Six summers ago, a heavy downpour half-submerged a streetcar and infamously trapped two men in an elevator as water rose to their chins. It was the last and mildest in a trilogy of floods: the 2013 storm smashed rainfall records and caused a billion dollars in damage. The 2005 storm racked up another half billion and left in Finch Ave West that could swallow an apartment building.
Century storm? A Torontonian still too young to buy liquor could have lived through four. As the city mopped up Wednesday, its top civil servant suggested the term had become meaningless. Members of the Beauty of the Don Facebook group share photos of the flora and fauna that make the Don River Valley an oasis.
But this week, the “I don’t even know why we talk about 100-year storms anymore, because that definition seems to have flown right out the window,” said Paul Johnson. Mayor Olivia Chow, echoing what many residents already suspected, was quick to blame climate change. The reality is a little more complicated, and potentially scarier.
But regardless of why Toronto is being hammered, the threat of frequent flooding has floated some tough questions. What kind of damage do we need to learn to live with — and what should we consider unacceptable? “Big storms are part of Toronto. We’ve had a number of them.
We’re going to have more of them. And we have to prepare for them,” said David Kellershohn, associate director of engineering services at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). “Let’s expect this again.
” Firefighters help a stranded motorist on the DVP on Tuesday. ** Amid the deluge Tuesday, Mayor Chow cited the same frightening statistic twice. “I do want to talk a bit about climate change.
It’s real. We are expecting to see almost double the number of severe rainstorm days in 15 years,” she said, repeating the same “double the number of days in the next 15 years” figure at a press conference a few hours later. The first half of that statement is undoubtedly true: climate change is real.
And at a global scale, climate scientists are confident that human-caused warming will lead to more intense rainfall and urban flooding. They have even calculated by how much: for every extra degree the planet warms, the intensity of these rainfall events . (The world has warmed by approximately 1 degree.
The actions we have taken to curtail emissions so far put the planet on track to warm by 2 or 3 degrees.) But how that global finding will play out locally is much more uncertain. Thunderstorms are especially tricky to model, because they are so hyperlocal and changeable.
Scarborough could tell you that: while much of western Toronto and Etobicoke received greater-than-100-year rainfall volumes, the far east of the city saw only five- to ten-year amounts, according to rain gauge data by councillor Jennifer McKelvie, chair of the infrastructure and environment committee. The city rain gauge that saw the most rainfall, on the western border of Etobicoke, received 98 millimetres. People take pictures of a flooded Etienne Brule Park as the banks of the Humber River flooded the area in Toronto on Tuesday.
The city rain gauge that saw the most rainfall, on the western border of Etobicoke, received 98 millimetres. In its , Environment and Climate Change Canada also found, with high confidence, that daily extreme rainfall is projected to increase nationwide. But the same report concluded that it was difficult to calculate by how much, and how this national finding would apply at scales as small as a city.
The report also found no evidence, yet, that these changes are already occurring — although that might simply because the change is too small to detect or because there isn’t enough weather station data. It’s unclear where Chow found the “double the days in 15 years” prediction. Her staff didn’t provide a reference for it when asked by the Star.
And for some people, all this statistical back-and-forthing is irrelevant to what they feel in their gut. Tuesday’s storm was the latest in a string of weird weather that just doesn’t seem normal. For others, the numbers matter.
If a century storm is really now a once-in-ten-year storm, that’s a profound shift in our reality as a city. On the other hand, if we’ve just been pummelled by some very bad luck — a once-in-a-century storm is a probability, not a promise, and nature hates a schedule — that might be reassuring. It might also be scarier: what more could climate change have in store, if this isn’t it? A pedestrian struggles to navigate the floodwaters at Lake Shore Blvd.
W. at Rees St. in downtown Toronto on Tuesday.
“Regardless of when that next 100-year storm event is, it doesn’t change the importance of preparing for it and being aware of its possibility,” said the TRCA’s Kellershohn. Urban flooding is influenced by extreme rainfall, but it’s also the result of design choices: expanding impermeable surfaces like concrete and asphalt, situating high-cost assets in risky areas. What we choose to defend from flooding depends on our values, Kellershohn added — and not everyone values the same thing.
“If I was a commuter, I would want the Don Valley Parkway fixed up. But if I was a homeowner, I’d want something else fixed. And so how do you how do you prioritize?” One important way: “you do have to listen to the public.
” A heavily flooded Don Valley Parkway after a deluge of rain on Tuesday. ** The public needs to have this debate, and soon. But while theoretically any change is possible, experts say some are so cost-prohibitive they aren’t worth pursuing.
“People (on Tuesday) complained that the DVP is constantly inundated with water,” said Jason Thistlethwaite, co-lead of the University of Waterloo’s Climate Risk Research Group and professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development. “Guess what: that’s by design. Toronto is just going to have to live with that.
Ideally you don’t build a critical piece of infrastructure on a floodplain, but that water is better there than in people’s houses,” he said, adding that raising the highway up would cost tens of billions of dollars. The same goes for Union Station, Thistlethwaite said: you can’t realistically move it at this point, and while it’s possible to put some defences at subway stations, it’s very hard to keep water out of an underground tunnel. He noted both the parkway and the subway were up and running normally by the morning after the storm.
A person makes their way through Union Station during a flood following heavy rain in Toronto on Tuesday. “If you’re thinking about this from a climate resilience perspective, that’s not as terrible of a disruption as I thought. So with transportation, I think there’s some room for forgiveness.
” The same is not true for other services that went down Tuesday, according to Thistlethwaite. Losing power and telecommunications: “that’s inexcusable,” he said. Decentralization and resilience are the key words to building a power grid that can withstand At the peak of the outage, Toronto Hydro reported 167,000 customers without power.
A Hydro One station in Toronto’s west end flooded; a spokesperson said workers are still investigating the cause of the outage and what actions are needed to make the system more resilient to extreme weather. Some customers with Canada’s largest wireless providers also after the storm, which the telecoms blamed on cell towers losing power and on strained capacity as Wi-Fi went down and users surged to the cellular networks. Losing power is a big problem for a lot of reasons, Thistlethwaite and other experts said.
It impedes connection to emergency services. It knocks out people’s sump pumps, which require power to remove water out of basements before they flood. And Tuesday’s storm hit during a very hot and humid stretch, depriving many of air conditioning, which can be extremely dangerous for vulnerable people like seniors and children.
The flooding of the Don River and the nearby Don Valley Parkway is actually by design, and not something that will end any time soon. “All the health, safety, shelter stuff — electricity, emergency services. They really need to stay intact,” Thistlethwaite said.
If we decide to accept that certain parts of the city will continue to flood, “then the warning and emergency systems set up need to be impeccable,” said Anabela Bonada, managing director of climate Science at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo. A 13-year-old died during flooding in Nova Scotia last week, prompting the provincial government to for not issuing an alert; the mother of a six-year-old boy who died in flash flooding in the province last summer until after he was already dead. In Toronto too, “people could have died,” Bonada said, and agreed that keeping telecommunications networks working is critical.
Kellershohn noted that while people are talking about flooding now, the public’s level of engagement with this problem is often low. He cited a study that found only 6 per cent of people knew their home . Thistlethwaite pointed to the lack of publicly available — a jumping off point for who is at risk and what to do about it.
“I wish the public was more engaged on flood protection,” said Kellershohn, adding he has seen success when city councillors engage their constituents. But, he added, “they’re engaged now .”.
