Canada Tries a Forceful Message for Flood Victims: Live Someplace Else
By Christopher Flavelle
Published Sept. 10, 2019 Updated Sept. 11, 2019
GATINEAU, Quebec — Along the coast of the United States, people who lost homes to Hurricane Dorian are preparing to rebuild. But Canada — which has faced devastating flooding of its own — is testing a very different idea of disaster recovery: Forcing people to move.
Unlike the United States, which will repeatedly help pay for people to rebuild in place, Canada has responded to the escalating costs of climate change by limiting aid after disasters, and even telling people to leave their homes. It is an experiment that has exposed a complex mix of relief, anger and loss as entire neighborhoods are removed, house by house.
“Canadians are stubbornly beginning to reconsider the wisdom of building near flood-prone areas,” said Jason Thistlethwaite, a professor of environment and business at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “It’s taking government action to obligate people to make better decisions.”
The real-world consequences of that philosophy are playing out in Gatineau, a city across the river from Ottawa that has been hit by two 100-year-floods since 2017. Residents here are waiting for officials to tell them if the damage from the latest flood, in April, exceeded 50 percent of the value of those homes. Those who get that notice will be offered some money and told to leave.
In many cases, residents are fine with that.
“I’m very happy,” said Louise David, who just learned that the government will force her to take a buyout. “I don’t want to live this again.”
Canada’s approach offers lessons for the United States, where the quickening tempo and growing force of storms such as Dorian has strained government budgets.
Dorian is the third hurricane to strike North Carolina in four years. Many of the places inundated this time, such as Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks, had been hit by one of the earlier storms as well, only to rebuild and then flood again.
The cost of that approach is growing. As of last year, the United States had 36,774 houses and other buildings the government describes as “severe repetitive loss properties,” homes that have flooded and repaired at least twice, according to data from the Natural Resources Defense Council. More than 1,100 of those are in North Carolina; the average such home has been flooded five times.
The Canadian approach is very different.
“What everybody would like is for the problem to not exist. But it does,” said David Foster, spokesman for the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, which supports the steps that officials in Canada are taking. “We expect government will behave maturely, and sometimes that means taking an approach that is difficult but wise.”
By most accounts, Canada’s experiment began in the summer of 2013, when floods in southern Alberta caused more than 7.5 billion Canadian dollars, or about $5.7 billion, in damage, the most expensive disaster in the country’s history at the time. The toll was particularly great in High River, a town of 14,000 about an hour south of Calgary where floods affected 80 percent of homes.
Rather than pay to rebuild them all, officials issued mandatory buyouts for two particularly exposed neighborhoods.
Not all residents were on board. “Those were some of the worst meetings I’ve ever been involved in, telling people they’ve got to leave their homes,” said Craig Snodgrass, High River’s mayor, who supported the buyouts.
Still, the homes came down.
Mr. Snodgrass says that the city as a whole is now better protected. “You’ve got to make the decision for the greater good of the community,” he said. “This is going to happen again. The water is coming, folks.”
That philosophy spread. In 2015, Canada made it harder for lower levels of government to get federal money after disasters. The next year, British Columbia said flood victims who had chosen not to buy private flood insurance would be ineligible for government aid.
This year the federal government went further still, warning that homeowners nationwide would eventually be on their own. If people deliberately rebuild in danger zones, at some point “they are going to have to assume their own responsibility for the cost burden,” Public Security Minister Ralph Goodale told reporters in April. “You can’t repeatedly go back to the taxpayer and say, ‘Oh, it happened again.’”
continues at nytimes.com |
