The people at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority were leaving nothing to chance during the recent deluge. On July 9, in addition to everything else, they were paying special attention to a newly built mound that's part of the
River City 2 condo development.
"We were monitoring it 24/7," says the
TRCA's Sameer Dhalla of what's technically known as a
berm, or a
flood protection landform, put in place by the TRCA and
Urban Capital,
the developer behind the River City condo project.
It was built to protect the eastern downtown core, from the Don to Bay Street, from the sort of flooding that's known in meteorological circles as a 100-year storm.
And during the lashing the city got on July 9, the TRCA were at no point certain this wasn't one of them.
There were indications that it might not be. The storm limited itself to the downtown core, for instance, excluding much of the Don River watershed, which extends north to Richmond Hill, meaning there would probably be little of what's known as river flooding--the exult of too much rain dumped into the entirety of a river system--as opposed to urban flooding, which is what happens when a city's sewerage and guttering infrastructure can't handle the amount of rain that's falling, and backs up into the streets.
In the end, this ended up being one of the saving graces of what was otherwise quite a catastrophic storm. The very fact that the city's infrastructure couldn't handle the rain meant that not too much of it made it into the rivers, keeping the truly monumental sort of flooding that happened along the Humber during 1954's
Hurricane Hazel at bay.
When the storm was over, the berm was barely touched, with no flooding at all in the flood protection landforms vicinity, south of King Street between River Street and the river.
Which, on one hand, is good news, and on the other, means we ain't seen nothing yet.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sameer Dhalla