With Hurricane Harvey causing billions of dollars in damages in the US, a Canadian catastrophic loss expert believes Canada can learn a thing or two from the weather event.
Flooding is slowly becoming one of Canada’s biggest concerns, with experts saying climate change is exacerbating the problem. Just last April and May, parts of Montreal experienced large-scale flooding, which forced the city to provide nearly $9 million in financial compensation to affected residents.
For the southeastern portion of Texas, Hurricane Harvey has caused unprecedented flooding, leaving over 300,000 people without electricity and billions of dollars of property damage sustained already. The damage has been so severe that Moody’s Analytics places the total damage estimate between US$40 billion and US$50 billion.
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Glenn McGillivray, managing director of Western University’s Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, analyzed the catastrophe and found that there are some important lessons that Canada can learn from its neighbor, if it wants to avoid suffering the same fate.
One way Texas could have mitigated flooding, McGillivray explained, is by properly planning development well in advance. He believes poor city planning led to fewer ways for the storm runoff to dissipate.
“They’ve been building like there’s no tomorrow including building into green lands and wetlands. . . They sop up water. They help us manage water better. You know, when you pave over these areas, when you put up big box stores with big roofs and these sorts of things, water simply has no place to go.” he told
Radio Canada International.
“It runs off very quickly into rivers and creeks and streams and reservoirs. They soon burst their banks and you have a problem. Really, we’re seeing this in most major cities in North America.”
While proper city planning can help reduce flooding, McGillivray pointed out that actual city development in Canada is a responsibility that is inefficiently divided between municipal and provincial governments – with the former group making the decisions about development and the latter paying for relief from disasters.
“There is a bit of a disconnect there and I think local governments either have to have more skin in the game or the more senior government needs more say in where we build things and how we build things,” he said.
McGillivray also said that Canada’s insurance industry needs to be more involved in the flood mitigation process, acknowledging recent efforts. He noted that the federal government has recently started to engage with the insurance industry and has set standards for flood mapping. He also underlined that the insurance industry has only recently begun to offer flood insurance.
He also drew attention to a recently-announced federal fund of $2 billion for disaster mitigation and adaptation.
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