Flooding is the costliest natural hazard in Canada, and that’s expected to get worse with climate change. A potential solution people don’t like to talk about is exactly what some experts say we must consider: When is it time to stop living on the riskiest waterfront properties altogether?
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Thomas Little revels in the view out the back window of his home in Gatineau, Que.
“I’m literally only a 14-minute drive from Parliament Hill and [in] my backyard I see trees and [the] river and I don’t see the city at all. It’s quite a little paradise,” Little said.
But there was nothing to make him think of paradise in 2017 when floodwaters burst over the two-metre-high wall of sandbags he built to try to keep the Gatineau River at bay.
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“My whole basement was totally flooded in about four feet of water,” Little told What on Earth host Laura Lynch.
“I was just totally brokenhearted and tired because I had been laying sandbags for three weeks…. I had no hydro. I had no heat. It was raining. It was cold. It was just a nightmare.”
Little’s experience is hardly unique, as across Canada, flooding has become the most expensive natural disaster, costing $1 billion annually in damage to homes, property and infrastructure, according to the federal Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness.
Insurers and many policy experts expect that number will go up. Sea levels are rising. A recent study by researchers at Environment and Climate Change Canada found that climate change has made rainfall more extreme and storms with extreme rainfall more frequent.
While experts see a variety of strategies to help deal with the situation, there is one potential solution people may not want to talk about: When might it be time to retreat from living on the riskiest waterfront properties altogether?
Floodwaters returned behind Little’s house in 2019, although the sandbags weren’t breached. Many times, Little said, he’s thought about moving away. But for him, it’s just not an option.
“This is my retirement fund, so to speak. I couldn’t get rid of it and I couldn’t afford to walk away.”
The Quebec government offered him $200,000 to walk away, but in his mind, that was no option either. Rather, he said, it was an “insult.”
“I spent many years in this house making it mine and … giving me a measly $200,000 to walk away … in this economy, what do you do with $200,000? You can’t buy another house. So my answer was no.”
Looking for options
Jason Thistlethwaite, an associate professor at the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development at the University of Waterloo in southwestern Ontario, expects we will see more programs like the one in Quebec, where residents were offered money to leave their homes.
“Taxpayers are starting to see what’s going on here and they simply aren’t willing to continue paying to rebuild in high-risk flood areas, so the solution is you try to give people the option of leaving or relocating to a safer area,” he told Lynch.
“These strategies are by far the best forms of ri