Toronto infrastructure overwhelmed by rare storm, experts say

Thestar.com
August 9, 2018
Tamar Harris

When water began pouring into Cara Linehan’s basement, she thought the washing machine was flooding.

“Then we went into my room and it was completely flooded,” said Linehan, who lives near Dufferin and College streets. “There was water coming through the walls and up from the ground.”

City workers clear storm water drains along a storm water channel Wednesday near the intersection of Wilson Ave. and Jane St. after heavy flooding across the city the night before.

Linehan and her roommates were among the many households affected by what a meteorologist called a one-in-100-year storm that pummelled Toronto. Tenants like Linehan living in more affordable basement apartments were hit particularly hard by the flooding -- she said that three of the house’s rooms are in the basement, and they’ll have to discard a ruined sofa, floor mats and a dresser.

Flooded basements, waterlogged streets, stalled public transportation and overflowing sewers beset the city in a matter of hours on Tuesday night, with 72.3 millimetres of rain measured at Billy Bishop airport between 9 and 11 p.m.

“I’ve never experienced this in my life before,” said Linehan, who recently immigrated to Canada from Ireland.

Toronto’s infrastructure was not designed to handle weather events like Tuesday’s storm, said urban planner Ken Greenberg.

“When you have 60, 70 or 80 millimetres of rain in two hours, it simply overwhelms not only the sewers but also affects the skin of buildings, elevators and underpasses.”

As the city grows, more surfaces become concrete and impermeable, he said. That pushes stormwater into sewer systems rather than being gradually absorbed into the ground.

As events like Tuesday’s storm become more frequent, “it’s dawning on us” that existing city standards did not anticipate the level of stress that climate change is bringing, he said, adding that it’s “maddening” to see the reluctance of elected officials, who still don’t want to take climate change seriously.

Jennifer Drake, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto, said Toronto “is an old city” and events like this storm are a reminder of challenges facing high-density urban centres all over the world.

“We’re left with this legacy infrastructure that leaves us with insufficient space for storing stormwater,” Drake said.

Toronto runs on a combined sewer system while modern cities are built on separated sanitary and stormwater systems. “In extreme weather, our single sewer is overwhelmed,” she said.

The cost required to eliminate the flood risk is “astronomical” to the point of being impossible, she said. The best way to approach the issue is to invest more in emergency preparedness and prediction, she said.

“If we had the police out there in advance at that underpass, for instance, we could have prevented drivers from carelessly continuing and becoming trapped,” she said.

John Tory, making a campaign stop in Scarborough on Wednesday, thanked emergency, hydro and city employees for their work overnight.

He said the city is investing in mitigating stormwater, but he was challenged by questions about why he moved to shelve a city staff plan in 2017 designed to modernize Toronto’s approach to stormwater management by introducing a dedicated levy instead of the existing system, in which dealing with runoff water is funded by a charge on water bills, so residents and businesses that use more water pay a bigger share of that cost.

The staff plan, which would have shifted how fees are collected based on the amount of owners’ hard surfaces, including buildings, paved areas, driveways and walkways, was meant to incentivize private owners of large properties like malls with abundant hard-surface areas like parking lots to better deal with stormwater on site.

 “If I thought that that decision at any time, in any way, affected any project that was in the capital budget of the city to the extent of one penny, I might have a regret about that decision,” Tory said.

“This was simply a different way of collecting the same money. The money is available to make sure that the infrastructure is upgraded, whether it has to do with basement flooding or some of the other kinds of effects of these storms that we have.”

In 2017, Tory faced criticism from Premier Doug Ford, who was then still mulling a rematch for the mayor’s chair in the municipal election and who supported the incorrect claim by Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti that the dedicated stormwater charge was a new “tax” on property owners.

The mayor insisted at the time there were issues with the staff’s plan, such as the possibility that school boards would demand to be exempted from the dedicated levy, saying that they were insurmountable. City staff said that wasn’t the case.

On Wednesday, despite being pressed about the staff plan, Tory did not acknowledge the environmental benefits of dealing more effectively with stormwater runoff and avoiding flooding in some areas outlined by staff and advocates after years of research.

Tips for dealing with basement floods can be found on the city of Toronto website.