How prepared is KW for a flood?
Posted Aug 5, 2014 10:53:47 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
With Burlington in shock after a massive rainfall flooded city streets, the big question is: could it happen here?Nick Gollan, the manager of storm water utility with the City of Kitchener, says with the amount of rainfall we’re seeing now, what happened in Burlington could happen anywhere.
“We’re seeing more intense rainfalls, so that tends to overwhelm the drainage systems — especially in older areas of cities,” says Gollan. He adds that storm water management is an evolving technology, and so the infrastructure has adapted over time.
“Here in Kitchener, the generally-accepted principle is to design our storm sewers to deal with a storm that we’d see once every five years,” Gollan says.
Just this past weekend, showers were substantial enough that Weber Street in Waterloo saw flooding, as well as some of the newer subdivisions in North Waterloo. Interestingly, though, Gollan says roads in newer subdivisions are actually designed to hold water to keep them away from basements.
“When you see flooding on streets, in some areas, that’s intentional,” says Gollan. “When we have these higher rainfalls, it’s really about getting that water to the outlet, which in our case here is the Grand River.”
Gollan says one of the things that makes Waterloo Region unique is its storm water credit program, which encourages people to be active in preventing water from building up.
“We were one of the first municipalities in Canada to actually implement these programs,” Gollan notes.
