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If climate change is causing the flooding of the Red Hill Valley Parkway, things are likely to get worse as temperature records are smashed. City officials rejected or ignored numerous warnings about climate change and flooding prior to construction of the roadway.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said last month was the hottest June in recorded history and that records were also set in March, April and May. June was the 304th consecutive month with a global surface temperature higher than the 20th century average – an unbroken string that extends back more than a quarter century to the winter of 1985.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change filed its first report in 1990, convincing Canada and most other industrialized countries to promise to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and endorse the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, six years before construction of the parkway began in 2003.
A 1997 city decision to reroute Red Hill Creek and cut $8 million from flood protection plans for the expressway was described as “courting disaster” by the chair of the Hamilton Conservation Authority, but municipal staff contended the changes were fiscally responsible.
“The Ontario Ministry of Transportation has backed off on what they’ll require in terms of a guarantee the expressway won’t be overtopped by water,” Dale Turvey told The Spectator. “On the best average, it will now be overtopped once every 50 years.”
He conceded that there had been three 50–year storms in the previous five years, but said a flood wouldn’t destroy the road but only mean it might go under 15 centimetres of water when Mother Nature got nasty.
A 1999 Health Canada review of expressway studies warned that climate change should be evaluated prior to construction.
“Many of the steps required to address climate change will necessitate local actions and in order to properly examine the impact of this project, this issue needs to be addressed,” it noted. “Both the provision of new roadways AND the removal of a significant green space and tens of thousands of trees have impacts that need to be viewed from a climate change perspective.”
In the same year, an open letter from over 100 McMaster University professors cited climate change as one of the reasons the expressway project should be subject to a full federal environmental assessment. The following year, a McMaster geology student warned the road would “be prone to damage from flooding” and that motorists might be “trapped by rampaging floodwaters.”
The city’s chief expressway engineer responded that the $10 million stormwater design exceeded “provincial standards for designing roads with respect to the danger of flooding” and would “withstand a 100–year storm standard.” But the student noted he “did not address my caution about the flood climatology of Red Hill Creek being based on historical weather data, without allowance for the affects of changing climate.”
The city successfully stopped the federal environmental assessment in 2001, paving the way for construction to begin in 2003. A year later, a 14 millimetres rain storm stranded a construction worker in the creek.
“Witnesses said it took about half an hour for the backhoe to nearly disappear in five metres of muddy water as construction workers watched helplessly from the banks of the pond,” reported a Spectator story.
That year also saw the city commission its first study on the implications of climate change for Hamilton.
Since 2004, 12 major storms have flooded city homes, including ones last year with more than 100 millimetres of rain. The parkway, which opened in the fall of 2007, has been closed by flooding four times. V
Stories are summarized from CATCH News, a service of Citizens at City Hall available from CATCH@Cogeco.ca.
More information can be found at www.hamiltoncatch.org
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