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Waterloo Region’s independent monthly • Volume 2 Issue 8 • may 8, 2014 • community.thecord.ca
wAtERlOO’s wild wEAthER As the weather gets more extreme, governments learn to adapt h.g. wAtsOn edITOR-IN-ChIeF
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rt Janzen was away from his office during last December’s ice storm when he was texted a photo from one of his employees. A woman driving past Menno S. Martin Contractor Ltd, the construction company Janzen heads as president, had slid off the road and wedged her car between the posts holding the company’s sign. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt. But the sign had to go. “We have been talking about redoing the signage in front of our shop,” said Janzen. “So it prompted that change.” Their story was fortunately one of the more humorous ones to come out of the ice storm that dumped 10 to 30 mm of freezing rain across Ontario in late December and left some people in the region without power for days. Extreme weather, like the kind we experienced this winter, is becoming more normal as climate change raises temperatures and changes weather patterns. While things like a damaged sign, or a house roof or car, are replaceable, the focus is fast moving away from response to mitigation and adaptation and — should the unthinkable happen — emergency management. Jason Thistlethwaite is the director of the Climate Change Adaptation Project at the University of Waterloo. He believes that municipalities are at the front line of climate change, something that became readily apparent not only with the ice storm in December, but with the series of violent storms that have rolled through the area in the last year. “To be honest I’ve never experienced weather like the weather we have had over
• STeVeN STINSON CCE CONTRIBUTOR
the last 12 months,” he said, noting that the region experienced three prolonged power outages related to ice storms in the winter and a violent thunderstorm in July 2013. Municipal infrastructure programs have a direct impact on how well that weather is handled. This became clear in Toronto, where
they reduced their tree canopy maintenance program the same year the ice storm struck. “That canopy program would have probably lowered the losses for the ice storm that hit in December,” said Thistlethwaite. Toronto’s city manager reported that ice storm costs reached about $106 million, with
the city’s forestry department incurring the majority of that cost. Damages sustained from the ice storm were estimated to be around $1.2 million in Waterloo region. Kitchener-Wilmont Hydro incurred costs of about $300,000 from Continued on page 4 >>