Hurricane Harvey shows that if disaster strikes, we’ll be stuck: Hume
A disaster like Hurricane Harvey can leave residents with a choice: to be stuck in their homes or stuck in their vehicles.

TheStar.com
Sept. 4, 2017
Christopher Hume

Come the apocalypse, most Torontonians know exactly what they’d do: just hop in the car and head north for the cottage.

Dream on. That fantasy would come to a screeching halt on the Don Valley Parkway somewhere well before the Bloor Viaduct.

As Hurricane Harvey has made painfully clear in recent days, when disaster strikes a big city, there’s no way out. Residents become prisoners. Either stuck in their homes or their vehicles; for many reasons, there’s nowhere for them to go.

Regardless, ever since a flood of biblical proportions laid waste to Houston, people have been demanding to know why no evacuation order was given. The answer is simple; it would only have piled one disaster on top of another.

“You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. “If you think the situation right now is bad, you give an order to evacuate, you are creating a nightmare.”

This flies in the face of the basic human impulse to run away from catastrophe, but Turner was right. Though heavily criticized, he told a truth no one wanted to hear. Sitting in a car in shoulder-high floodwaters isn’t exactly smart.

When Hurricane Rita hit Houston in 2005, locals — about 3.7 million of them — decided to hit the highway. They had seen what unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere during Hurricane Katrina, when some 1,800 people stayed home and were killed, and weren’t inclined to hang around. What followed has been called the “largest evacuation in U.S. history.”

It was also a nightmare. As National Public Radio reported at the time: “In searing 100-degree heat . . . The traffic jam stretched for over 100 miles and has been going on for over a day and a half . . . Gasoline was not to be found along the interstate and cars that ran dry made the gridlock even worse. Abandoned vehicles littered the shoulder lanes.”

Closer to home, an evacuation order was issued last year when devastating forest fires hit Fort McMurray, but not until buildings in the city were burning. Almost 90,000 people fled in their cars. Given that Fort McMurray is “a one-road-in, one-road-out city,” the inevitable result was chaos. Indeed, the only deaths connected to the fire came when a couple was killed in car crash during the evacuation.

In the aftermath, officials were criticized for not ordering the evacuation sooner. No surprise there; but call it too soon, you’re overreacting; wait too long, you’re risking lives. Damned if you, damned if you don’t.

The only thing these disaster-stricken cities have in common was their lack of preparation. Whether it’s even possible to prepare for catastrophe is doubtful, but some cities seem better at it than others. Vulnerability accumulates over decades through series of seemingly unrelated decisions. At the urging of Mayor John Tory, for example, Toronto recently opted to kill a plan that would have included a special levy to fund the costs of stormwater management. At the time council made its decision, much of the Toronto Islands was under water. Lake Ontario was at its highest level in a century, a full metre above the average of 2016.

In July 2013, when a month’s worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours, the subway was brought to a standstill, GO trains were stranded in water, power was cut to 300,000 and hundreds of cars abandoned, many on the parkway, which would be a major evacuation route in a disaster. Yet even at the best of times, the DVP, the Gardiner Expressway and the whole regional highway system are overwhelmed with traffic; their usefulness in a Hurricane Harvey-type situation would be limited.

In other words, we’re stuck — all 2.8 million of us. And indications are that the outcome wouldn’t be pretty. Consider, for example, the small but telling fact that the city forks out about $70 million annually through its basement protection scheme. Rather than confront the causes of flooding, it prefers to pay homeowners to bail out. As civic bureaucrats know only too well, in tough economic times — pretty well permanent in these parts — stormwater management budgets are among the first to be affected.

Clearly, city officials believe climate change measures can always be put off for another day. Though the effects of global warming are apparent, there is no collective sense of urgency. Toronto’s unspoken policy remains the same as always — it won’t happen here. If only.