How the Flooding in Alberta Happened
The flooding in Alberta has devastated homes and left many citizens stranded without a place to stay. Why wasn’t this predicted? Claire Martin explains how the flooding in Alberta unfolded so quickly and unexpectedly.
[youtube height=”326″ width=”580″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxSfbi9vLPA[/youtube]
I suspect this is only half the story – there are two other issues.
1. As populations urbanize, pavement starts to cover previously permeable areas, speeding up runoff. Trees are removed along with their stabilizing root structures.
2. What are all these buildings doing in a flood plain in the first place? I thought zoning/ building codes prevented this but maybe that’s only in my home province of Ontario? If the prairie flatness makes this impossible, intelligent humans must develop an answer. Some societies use stilts to get around this problem.
Given this logic, I’m against taxpayer aid or insurance, beyond emergency help, for regions that should be building their infrastructure for nature’s reality, not for convenience of low budget developers or hidebound traditionalists (demanding basements). Nor do I think we should blindly blame Global Warming, regardless of one’s position on that theory. Bad floods have occurred on occasion throughout history. It just seems we put our cities in the dumbest places– usually on the best farmland– and can’t control growth in the face of developer inducements /manipulation of the local political process.
When are we gonna learn?
As to the comment above: the situation here in the USA is similar if not worse. This especially applies to huge low-lying coastal areas, developed but completely at the mercy of flooding at “unusually” high tides, storms and hurricanes. They are regularly, (or soon will be) decimated, then the costs of the private developers profits fall on the taxpayer. Some areas are so bad private insurance has been withdrawn, so the Government is the only insurance provider.