ICLR Cat Tales November/December 2021

November/December 2021

CAT

Volume 15 • Issue 6

TALES

e-newsletter of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction

Inside this issue Disasters are a permanent part of the Canadian fabric.

We can’t keep winging it.

2 These B.C. storms are not the new normal. We can’t even see that from here 4 ICLR intervenes in B.C. Utilities Commission smart meter proceeding 5

ICLR Board of Directors Carol Jardine (Chair) • Wawanesa Ken Coley • Western Debbie Coull-Cicchini • Intact Matt Davison • Western Olivier Gay • SCOR Phil Gibson • Aviva Paul Kovacs • ICLR Claus Kroll • Munich Re Canada Monica Ningen • Swiss Re Andy Taylor • Gore Mutual John Taylor • OMIA Dan Shrubsole • Western Rob Wesseling • Co-operators

ICLR releases new five year strategic plan

ICLR has released its strategic plan for the period 2022 to 2026. The Plan will build on the Institute’s foundation of science, knowledge and experience but will also see ICLR aggressively work to encourage decision makers to implement actions to enhance disaster resilience. This marks a bold new change in direction for the Institute.

The new plan outlines four priorities for ICLR over the next five years. These are: • Be Canada’s leading provider of disaster research and loss reduction advice.

• Advocate for construction resilient to damage from severe weather and climate change.

• Empower risk reduction by communities and building owners.

• Champion building back better following a major loss.

ICLR will press to include our understanding of the science in practices adopted by communities, homebuilders, the construction industry, governments and those responsible for building codes and standards.

We will collaborate with home builders in pilot studies to test the real world application of ICLR’s findings.

We will advance our findings about how to prevent inflow and infiltration of stormwater into sanitary sewers, one of the leading factors contributing to basement flood damage.

ICLR will help develop a national standard to reduce severe wind and tornado damage risk in new homes and implement the national guide for wildfire resistant home construction.

The Institute will also press existing homeowners and businesses to retrofit their buildings and encourage governments to introduce regulations and incentives to strengthen resilience. >

ICLR will expand its Showcase Homes program and, in 2022, will celebrate the first 25 years of insurance industry leadership through ICLR to advance disaster risk reduction by establishing a display centre to provide a hands-on experience demonstrating opportunities to reduce the risk of damage.

ICLR’s Insurers Rebuild Stronger Homes program will demonstrate insurance

industry leadership to increase disaster resilience in recovery from a major disaster.

Learning from the success to advance hail damage reduction in Calgary, ICLR’s Resilience in Recovery program will share our findings to support action by local governments seeking to build back better after a major loss. Pre-disaster recovery planning can be used to secure

transformative improvement in resilience in recovery from a large loss. The Institute will press to build on industry leadership to establish a national commitment to build resilient buildings and public infrastructure in recovery.

The plan can be downloaded at https://www.iclr.org/about-us/

Disasters are a permanent part of the Canadian fabric.

We can’t keep winging it.

The tragic flooding in British Columbia over the past few weeks has resulted in a disaster that has captured our collective attention. Back-to-back-to-back storms and the compounding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have reinforced just how impactful disasters will be for Canadians in the years ahead. It is clear that we must reconsider our assumptions about these events as the climate crisis unfolds, as well as our approaches to catastrophic risk.

Not all that long ago, damages and resulting impacts caused by disasters in Canada were fairly mild and tolerable.

Sure, we had our share of loss events caused by extreme weather and other phenomena. But the numbers were relatively small and manageable from an insurance and provincial/federal disaster assistance perspective.

When the 1998 eastern Canadian ice storm caused more than $1-billion in insured damage, it was viewed as a statistical outlier. Canada had come nowhere close to a billion-dollar event prior to that. The ice storm remained Canada’s costliest insured disaster for 15 years, until flooding in Southern Alberta submerged several communities, including Calgary, in 2013.

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Grounded barge along Vancouver’s Seawall in False Creek. Photo taken in November 2021.

Damage from that event (about $1.7-billion insured) was soon overshadowed by the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alta., at about $4-billion in insured damage. Now, estimates of damage from B.C may drive the Fort McMurray loss into second place.

Since about 2008, Canada has witnessed more frequent and larger disasters,

including wildfires, hail, windstorms and flooding – all of which have been exacerbated and intensified by the climate crisis.

From 1983 to 2008, disaster losses cost Canadian insurers an average of about $400-million a year. Since 2009, the annual average has shot up to nearly $2-billion.

Total rainfall (cm)

>10 0 2 4 6 8

Rainfall total estimates throughout the Pacific Northwest on November 14 from the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite mission.

100 km

The Canadian insurance industry considers a severe event to be a “catastrophe” if claim costs exceed $25-million. When you add up all such events from 2008 to 2020, you get a whopping $21-billion.

Large, costly and disruptive disasters are here to stay. And yet, in Canada, we insist on treating them as a series of completely unforeseeable “one-offs.” We always appear to be caught collectively off-guard, as though Canadians are somehow uniquely immune to the consequences of the climate crisis and our deep connection to the fossil fuel industry.

This clearly can’t continue. We must radically shift our understanding of “catastrophe” and view disasters as systemic in nature. And systemic problems demand systemic responses.

Understanding disasters as systemic means viewing them not as unforeseeable tragedies but as more-permanent fixtures of Canadian life that require permanent institutions and permanent approaches dedicated to their management.

It means understanding that disasters come at the intersection of natural hazards (the storm, the wildfire, the earthquake) and societal vulnerability (while the hazard is natural, the disaster is human-made). It means understanding that disasters can have knock-on effects that need to be considered and planned for. And it means considering all this in

relation to our addiction to both fossil fuels and the contribution the industry makes to Canadian government coffers.

So while repurposing the Canadian Armed Forces to respond to severe events is not an entirely bad idea, it is also a good example of how we tend to treat disasters as one-offs. This approach is not sustainable, particularly as we can expect to see more and larger disasters in the years ahead.

Over the last week or so, we had Armed Forces personnel assisting with atmospheric river events on both coasts simultaneously. But what if these events occurred when our soldiers were heavily involved in a major foreign campaign?

Or addressing other aspects of another crisis compounding the newest disaster, such as a global pandemic?

A big part of treating disasters as systemic means ensuring that the right people are on the right bus, sitting in the right seats.

That would mean using professional emergency managers and responders, as opposed to soldiers often wholly unprepared for the job.

One place to start is with the creation of a dedicated Canadian federal emergency management agency that can focus entirely on disaster mitigation “before the storm,” response during, and recovery after.

Reducing the impacts and costs of disasters means reducing vulnerability – and the creation of such an agency is a piece of the puzzle. But so is addressing other diverse aspects of vulnerability – for instance, by transitioning off of fossil fuels, strengthening building codes, re-evaluating land use and reducing poverty.

As the events in B.C. have made clear, continuing to treat disasters in an ad-hoc and fragmented manner, as we do in Canada, is not the way forward. We need a permanent shift in perspective and approach that recognizes our permanent exposure to catastrophes.

This article original appeared in the Globe and Mail, December 6, 2021

Authors Glenn McGillivray Managing Director, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction and adjunct professor of disaster and emergency management at York University Korey Pasch PhD candidate in the department of political studies at Queen’s University

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These B.C. storms are not the new normal. We can’t even see that from here

By Glenn McGillivray, Managing Director, ICLR

Over the next several days, assessments will be made of the spectacular damage caused by this week’s “atmospheric river” severe rainfall event in British Columbia’s interior.

Starting last Saturday and continuing over the past few days, several watersheds in the region were inundated by well over 200 millimetres of rain – in some cases more than a typical November’s worth.

The rain fell over early-season mountain snow, which added to runoff totals.

The steep terrain typical of the area made matters considerably worse, and the cascading effects of the heavy rain were stunning.

Mudslides and debris flows exacerbated by the overactive B.C. wildfire season – and possibly by logging – led to the closures of several key highways. A major washout took out the Coquihalla Highway near Hope, B.C. By Monday afternoon, Vancouver was isolated from the rest of Canada by road.

Cascading effects also included the failure of Merritt, B.C.’s wastewater treatment plant. Along with major flooding, this led to a total evacuation order for the community of 7,000. Residents were warned water is undrinkable, even if boiled.

Power failures were rife, as Hope and other communities lost electricity early in the deluge. By Monday evening, tens of thousands of British Columbians were without power.

What’s more, the region relies heavily on truck deliveries from Vancouver for resupply of the most basic staples. The area’s supply chain was already disrupted this week, as pictures of bare shelves in grocery stores were posted on social media.

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A boat speeds along a flooded highway 1 in Abbotsford, B.C., on Nov. 16, 2021.

(Photo by Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)

A wise person in my field once said, “All disasters are cascading.” Ain’t that the truth.

It is generally understood in disaster research that most severe loss events are local. But this one is much larger.

This is partly why this situation is unique.

Often during a flood event, one community is impacted, making it easier for authorities to direct resources toward that one area. With this event, however, the list of communities hit is long: Merritt, Hope, Mission, Golden, Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Princeton and others.

Just weeks ago, B.C. was faced with the uncharacteristic challenge of having to deal with multiple, simultaneous fire events at the wildland-urban interface.

Now, it uncharacteristically has to deal with multiple flooding events at once.

It’s challenging enough to deal with one event in one place at one time. But these are exactly the kinds of greater challenges a warmer climate that is sometimes drier, sometimes wetter, will bring.

Incredibly, just about 130 days after obliterating heat records by close to 5ºC (almost unheard of, as new records usually outpace old by just tenths of a degree), large portions of the same areas are now underwater.

Climate change, it appears, is becoming a consumer of small Canadian communities.

On June 30, just one day after Lytton, B.C., exceeded the heat record for the area, the community was lost to a climate-change-fuelled wildfire. Incredibly, 90 per cent of the village was razed in just 20 minutes, killing two residents.

Large portions of Monte Lake, B.C., and other small communities were also lost by wildfire this summer.

According to a recent report, the June heat wave led to the deaths of almost 600 British Columbians, most over the age of 70. This number is roughly six times larger than the population of Lytton, and is comparable to a small community by itself.

Climate change is like a heat-seeking missile. But instead of being attracted to the heat signature of an enemy’s aircraft, it seeks out marginalized people and communities.

And small Canadian communities are at prime risk.

At a news conference earlier this week, defending the province’s disaster response, the minister responsible noted that emergencies such as flooding and mudslides start at the local level.

The problem is that small communities don’t have resources that larger ones have. They don’t have an adequate first response, nor do they have the resources to identify vulnerabilities and properly address them before disaster strikes (as outlined in this ominous piece of just a week ago).

The way we manage disasters in Canada is just another anachronistic shortcoming created in and for another time, and this must change.

What we are seeing in places like B.C. these days is not “normal.” It’s just another way station on the washed out road to the Anthropocene.

This article original appeared in the Globe and Mail, November 16, 2021

ICLR intervenes in B.C. Utilities Commission smart meter proceeding The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction has been granted formal Intervenor status in British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC) proceedings surrounding plans by FortisBC, the primary provider of natural gas in the lower mainland of the province, to replace all gas meters in its service area with “smart meters” over the next few years.

fires following a major earthquake in the Lower Mainland of B.C., reducing the risk of loss of life, injury and property damage and freeing up fire services who will otherwise be occupied dealing with other aspects of a major earthquake. ICLR previously had initial discussions with FortisBC on the issue.

ICLR believes that plans by FortisBC to install smart meters that eliminate the need for meter readers offers an excellent opportunity to incorporate seismic gas shutoff devices (SGSD) within the meters themself. This technology has been successfully employed in Japan for the last several decades and adds little to the cost of the meter. ICLR maintains that incorporation of SGSD in the new meters will significantly reduce the risk of multiple

Interveners participate actively for the duration of a proceeding. They participate by submitting questions and submissions, taking part in oral hearings, and/or filing evidence on matters that are within the scope of the proceeding. Interveners must submit documents in accordance with a regulatory timetable, provide valuable input to the BCUC, and help ensure various perspectives are represented in the BCUC’s proceedings.

ICLR will be represented in the proceedings by Dr. Charles Scawthorn, a leading international authority on managing the risk of fire following an earthquake and author of the ICLR studies Fire following earthquake in the Montreal region (August 2019) and Fire following earthquake in the Vancouver region (November 2020). He has also produced studies assessing fire following earthquake risk for the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tokyo.

Those interested in this matter can follow the proceedings at https://www.bcuc.com/OurWork/ ViewProceeding?applicationid=179

Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction Mission To reduce the loss of life and property caused by severe weather and earthquakes through the identification and support of sustained actions that improve society’s capacity to adapt to, anticipate, mitigate, withstand and recover from natural disasters.

20 Richmond Street East Suite 210 Toronto, Ontario M5C 2R9 T 416-364-8677 F 416-364-5889 www.iclr.org www.PIEVC.ca

Western University Amit Chakma Building, Suite 4405 1151 Richmond Street London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B9 T 519-661-3234 F 519-661-4273 www.iclr.org

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