Colby Cosh: Water, fire, and water trouble comes in threes for Fort McMurray – National Post

I decided to take a break from reading about the foreseeable health disaster for which nobody prepared ideally, in order to read about a different foreseeable disaster: the river floods now threatening low-lying areas of Fort McMurray. After much of the Alberta tarsands city was burned in a forest fire in 2016, there was a pell-mell effort to rebuild, and although some residents took insurance buyouts and said farewell, those who stayed felt strongly that, if possible, Fort Mac should be put back the way it was.

But at that time, everyone still remembered that the historic Waterways district and other parts of downtown had been flooded in 2013, and were likely to continue to be deluged periodically because of ice jams that form upstream from the city in the spring. The fire for even fire obeys the law of gravity, more or less had attacked the same low-lying areas with particular ferocity. At the time of the fire, Fort McMurrays own bylaws put strict floodproofing conditions on new building construction in the Waterways area. And the province was about to pass tough rules excluding new structures on known floodplains from disaster relief.

There was enormous pressure on city officials to act, so they came up with a plan. They would suspend their own floodproofing requirements for Waterways, let everyone rebuild there according to the less onerous pre-2013 standards, and construct a hypothetical demountable flood wall essentially a levee that could be assembled with a few hours notice and left in storage for most of the year to protect the neighbourhood. The provincial government quickly agreed to keep the areas eligibility for disaster relief in place while the levee was built.

Some folks didnt like this idea much. They included hydrologists, who denounced the mad dash back to the floodplain. Reinsurers werent especially happy either. In the trade publication Canadian Underwriter, one of them griped: Waterways residents are being allowed to rebuild in a flood plain to inadequate risk prevention standards. It is an emotional and financial decision for residents who do not wish to relocate and cannot afford the expense of building to a more robust code. As no one is willing to pay the additional cost government, the insurance industry or individuals the community is set up to repeat the mistakes of the past.

I am just willing to roll the dice and build my house back there as it was

In the end, the sentiment that won the day was the one expressed by a Fort Mac local: I am just willing to roll the dice and build my house back there as it was, and I cant see there being any issues.

Eventually, reader, an issue appeared: demountable flood barriers werent at all practical. Consulting engineers ended up discovering that, in the Waterways setting, Standalone walls would require ice force resistance systems, causing them to be quite large, with steel support beams going down to bedrock. And the demountable panels would be too large, as well, due to oversized sheeting, weighing about 500 kilograms per sheet. The city went ahead building a less ambitious series of berms and retaining walls, piece by piece, intentionally spreading the work out over a period of years. New funding for the latest berm in the series arrived in November. Not sure how far they got with it.

National PostTwitter.com/ColbyCosh

View post:
Colby Cosh: Water, fire, and water trouble comes in threes for Fort McMurray - National Post