When the rain started falling again on Aug. 10, Laura Sewell went outside and watched the water rise.
The drain in the driveway of her Britannia home she shares with her neighbour was not keeping up. Before long, there was about a foot of water sitting above it, spreading across her lawn, reaching her house and flowing downhill toward neighbouring properties.
For Sewell, it was a scene that had become disturbingly familiar. Just six weeks earlier, on Canada Day, four inches of water had filled the basement of the home she had owned for less than a year.
“Every time it rains, you feel this feeling of dread, and you’re going down to check the basement to make sure everything’s still dry,” Sewell told KT. “I’m going out to stand on the driveway in my boots trying to clear the drain.”
Nearly two months after one of the most intense rainstorms in Ottawa’s recorded history, the cleanup is far from over in some of the hardest-hit parts of the city’s west end.
The first storm on July 1 dumped as much as 167 millimetres of rain on Britannia in about five hours. The city has characterized the worst of the rainfall as exceeding a one-in-200-year event.
City officials have said the sheer intensity and volume of rain overwhelmed sanitary sewers, storm sewers and local drainage systems in the hardest-hit areas. In some places, the systems could no longer carry the water underground, sending it across streets and properties instead.
Sewell was at her moms Crystal Beach home when the rain started. Her basement also flooded. Sewell was unaware her home might have been impacted until getting a text from a neighbour. She returned home to see pooling in her driveway had drained, but the basement had not.
At her end of the street, she said, almost every house had flooded. Sewell and one neighbour had about four inches of water. Another neighbour had water roughly thigh-deep.
Sewell said her insurance company was so overwhelmed that weeks went by before an adjuster arrived. A restoration company took measurements, but nobody removed the damaged flooring or walls. Eventually, she hired someone herself.
Forty-seven days after the flood, Sewell said she finally received an estimate for repairs, only to find she believed the work had been significantly under-scoped.
Her basement now needs new walls, doors and flooring. But after seeing water return during the August storms, Sewell is questioning whether rebuilding it should even be the first priority.
“If the city drain is going to repeatedly flood my property, then I think I need to be looking at, instead of refinishing my basement, I need to be looking at something like a sump pump or a backflow valve,” she said. “Definitely I need foundation work now.”
A once in 200-year storm
The scale of the cleanup became apparent across the city almost immediately after the Canada Day storm. By July 15, Ottawa reported conducting more than 3,300 wellness visits and collecting more than 2,600 tonnes of storm debris. More than 1,000 visits had been made to city information hubs and sessions established for affected residents.
At a Crystal Beach home operated by Total Communication Environment, a non-profit that provides residential and other support to adults with multiple disabilities and special communication needs, the water rose rapidly.
Robin Barrett, the organization’s executive director, said what began as a small amount of water became about a foot and a half of sewage in a short period of time. The five residents living there had to leave.
They were split among other TCE properties while staff dealt with the emergency. The organization operates numerous locations across Ottawa, several of which were also dealing with water during the storm.
The Crystal Beach house was uninhabitable for more than 10 days. Its furnace, hot water heater and air conditioner had to be replaced. Fire-protection equipment was also damaged. Flooring and drywall needed to be ripped out, and the washer and dryer were lost.
The final repair bill is expected to reach roughly $55,000 to $60,000. That does not include all of the costs TCE faced elsewhere.
“We’d like to see really good investment into that area,” Barrett said. “What was interesting is we have a newer property that’s also in Crystal Beach that has all of the things that it needs to manage water, and it did not sustain any damage at all.”
Nah Ward Coun. Theresa Kavanagh told KT that questions about aging infrastructure are now being raised throughout her ward.
Lakeview is one example. Unlike neighbourhoods with conventional underground stormwater systems, parts of the community still rely on roadside ditches. Kavanagh had been pushing for ditch renewal before the Canada Day flood and said work is planned there.
Crystal Beach presents different questions because it does have storm sewers.
“It never had flooding before, so why now?” Kavanagh said. “You know, 60 years, people have been in their houses.”
Perhaps nowhere has the long tail of the Canada Day storm been more visible than at 30 McEwen Ave.
The 228-unit Park West apartment tower was heavily flooded on July 1, with water covering its main floor and basement and knocking out the building’s electrical transformer.
The basement and first floor remain closed because of the damage. Laundry facilities are unavailable and the garbage chute is not functioning. Residents say general maintenance has also become increasingly difficult.
Elevator service remains limited, with the service elevator the only elevator travelling to the ground floor, according to residents. One tenant said she knows of roughly 30 people planning to move out of the building over the next month.
A lack of provincial support
Provincial disaster relief has become one of the biggest sources of frustration.
Ontario activated the Disaster Recovery Assistance for Ontarians program following the July 1 storm, but only for properties in the Graham Creek and Stillwater Creek areas. The program can reimburse eligible homeowners, tenants, small businesses, farms and non-profits for some emergency, cleanup and essential repair costs not covered by insurance.
That leaves residents in several of the west-end communities hit hardest by flooding outside the designated area.
Ottawa-West Nepean MPP Chandra Pasma has been collecting petition signatures and residents’ stories while urging the province to expand the disaster assistance program to include everyone affected by the July 1 flooding.
She also brought Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles to Ottawa West—Nepean to meet directly with residents and hear about the financial and emotional toll the disaster has taken.
“It has a real impact and not just in terms of financial, but emotional, mental, physical, needing to throw away things that were incredibly meaningful and valuable, to fighting the insurance company, fighting the province, and feeling like people just had no help,” Pasma said.
Pasma said what has particularly frustrated her is that senior provincial officials have not come to the affected west-end neighbourhoods to see the damage firsthand.
“The premier hasn’t come, the Minister of Emergency Preparedness and Response didn’t come, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing — and all three of them were in Ottawa for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference this weekend,” Pasma said. “In fact, Jill Dunlop ran a tabletop exercise on emergency response, but none of them could be bothered to come and actually meet with people who had been affected.”