Severe weather hit the Prairies hard this summer, reporting more than $1.8 billion in insured losses across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC).
But the Edmonton area was hit especially hard due to heavy rainfall in June and July, said Aaron Sutherland, the IBC’s western vice president.
“In and around Edmonton, I think we saw five or six, what we call, catastrophic events, which is more than $30 million in damage,” Sutherland said, adding the organization received thousands of insurance claims from people in the region.
“Our sewer and storm infrastructure is aging out and it’s no longer equipped to handle the precipitation levels that we’re seeing.”
Sutherland said municipalities need to prioritize upgrading infrastructure to mitigate future flooding caused by an influx of rainfall and storms.
“The world is changing and we’re going to see more rainfall and more extreme weather events — not less — moving forward,” he said. “We do recognize there’s a cost, but there’s a greater cost in cleaning up $1.8 billion [in the Prairies] just this year alone.”
Homeowners felt strain on city infrastructure
Edmontonians repeatedly reported flooded basements, wastewater backups and overwhelmed sump pumps throughout the summer months.
Jenny Derby was one of them. Her home in the Alberta Avenue area flooded on July 27, when the city saw three major storms hit in short succession.
“My daughter went downstairs about three hours after the last storm hit and screamed upstairs to my husband ‘It’s wet,’” Derby said.
The line connected to her house is a combination of rainwater and sewer. That day, the sewer line backed up because it couldn’t clear out between the storms, Derby said.
Luckily, she learned she had taken out extensive flood insurance when she purchased her home.
“I must have had the world’s largest panic attack or anxiety,” she said about buying flood insurance. “I took out the most comprehensive water package ever known to my insurance agent.”
Derby has been paying $500 per month — more than half her mortgage — for that protection, she said. But as a result, the required restoration work and replacement of her belongings will be fully covered.
She could be paid out about $100,000 as a result of the flooding, as well as the discovery of asbestos-glued tiles in her basement, she said.
“The insurance portion of my life has probably been the easiest thing to deal with,” she said.
Not all Edmontonians were so lucky, however.
“This [summer] has been horrible,” said Michelle Gibson, who owns a townhouse in Beaumaris, on Edmonton’s north side.
Her first flood happened on June 24, when her basement filled with two feet of raw sewage, she said, adding that all 10 units of the townhouse complex flooded.
“Some people had two sump pumps, some people had backflow valves, some people had nothing, but everybody was flooded. Nothing stopped it.”
Gibson says her house continued to suffer sewage flooding all summer.
“I’ve literally spent the last three months highly anxious anytime it rains,” she said. “Anytime that it rained, even sprinkled, … I had to leave work and just go home and pump water.”
Gibson said she paid for a drainage specialist to inspect her home, and they told her the neighbourhood’s water infrastructure is so overloaded there’s nothing she can do to prevent future flooding.
“I’ve put a smaller backflow valve on my drain in the basement. They have told me that that will do nothing,” she said. “The [drainage specialist] said his best advice to me was to fix it as much as possible and sell in the winter and move to a different neighborhood.”
Gibson says she’s had to pay roughly $23,000 out of pocket.
“It’s obliterated my savings and I now have a home that I’m living in that I have no idea what to do with.”
In a statement to CBC News, Epcor said it received about 10,000 calls due to severe weather from mid-June to mid-July.
“Significant weather events can provide valuable information about how our infrastructure performs under extreme conditions,” the statement said. “Epcor is actively reviewing storm impacts, system performance and operational response activities to assess potential improvements or changes in our capital or investment plans.”
That work complements its ongoing 20-year stormwater integrated resource plan, which includes projects to mitigate flooding and a stormwater network “designed to anticipate and respond to storm conditions in real time.”
The City of Edmonton has also applied for the province’s Hazard Assistance and Resilience Program (HARP), which could reimburse the city up to 90 per cent of disaster costs, if the municipality’s application is approved.
