RC121 NovDec 2025 - Magazine - Page 24
FLOOD MITIGATION
READY FOR A RAINY DAY
Severe flooding led the City of Ottawa to create a
Climate Change Master Plan
by Mark Douglas Wessel
I
Mark Douglas Wessel
is an urban journalist
and communications
consultant. He writes
a regular column
called Green Living for
Postmedia.
24—RENEW CANADA –NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025
(and then) narrow it down to infrastructure driven risk
assessments as well.”
As a result of those e昀昀orts, the city now has an overall
climate resiliency strategy called Climate Ready Ottawa,
which Robinson says is “a multi year, multi phase program in part because we’re doing it slowly and… we need
to do it as a collaborative approach… bringing all of our
departments on board and helping them to prioritize and
understand where their next steps are.”
Including of course, the city’s Water Resource Planning
and Engineering Department, which plays a critical role in
the city’s 昀氀ood mitigation e昀昀orts; including producing its
own urban 昀氀ood information report.
A report comprised of a handful of key focus areas
according to Hiran Sandanayake, who not only is manager
of the above-mentioned department but also the chair of
the National Committee on Climate Change for the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association.
“What we do holistically to deal with 昀氀ooding,” observes Sandanayake, begins with planning and strategy
which pertains to such essential considerations as “choosing the right thing to go in the ground or on the road or
on your roof. Then there’s community design, there’s
operations and maintenance, there’s risk assessment and
mitigation planning.”
Recognizing it’s only a matter of when rather than if
Ottawa will have to deal with future 昀氀ooding concerns,
Sandanayake observes that the city is taking a multi-faceted
approach to adaptation that intersects with city-wide emergency management, public works and sewer management
e昀昀orts. But also at the local level, residential programs.
Capable of handling up to 43,000 m3 of water per event (approximately
18 Olympic-sized swimming pools), planning for Ottawa’s CSST’s
4.2-kilometre network of tunnels commenced back in 2009.
RENEWCANADA.NET
CITY OF OTTAWA
T WAS RANKED THE NO. 1 story of 2019. And while it took
place in Ottawa, it wasn’t exactly the kind of story the
city would like to see repeated any time soon.
The story in question was “Another Record Setting
Ottawa River Flood,” which according to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCE) was the
top weather occurrence of 2019. A 昀氀ood the government
department declared “was bigger than the 2017 event that
was then considered the 昀氀ood of the century.”
The ECCE’s 2019 weather round up states that
everything about the Ottawa River 昀氀ood “including its
size and duration was unprecedented.” An unfortunate
nexus of: snowfall accumulation that was 50 per cent higher than normal for that winter; multiple rounds of heavy
spring rains; and warm air from the southwest. All of
which conspired to raise the Ottawa River 30 centimetres
above the 2017 昀氀ood’s peak levels.
In terms of the damage done, over 6,000 homes in
Ottawa and Gatineau, were 昀氀ooded or at risk, roads and
streets in the a昀昀ected areas were closed for extended
periods, ferry services were cancelled and several bridges,
including the Chaudière between Ottawa and Gatineau
were closed.
The sheer scale of this calamity compelled Ottawa’s
city council to declare a climate emergency, including the
decision to allocate $250,000 toward “accelerating climate
action.” Which in turn led to the creation of a 35-page Climate Change Master Plan, unveiled in January 2020.
Revisiting the fact the city experienced two major 昀氀ood
events within the span of a couple of years, Julia Robinson,
the city’s Program Manager for Climate Adaptation describes 2019 as “a trigger year for focussing on adaptation…
the preparedness side as well as our mitigation e昀昀orts.”
In addition to the Climate Change Master Plan, which
was a city-wide risk assessment, “we also did ones on our
critical drinking water and wastewater facilities,” Robinson says. Work designed to “understand our risks overall
