Tory Govt. Defends Performance, But 2 Water Experts Blast Alberta's Failure To Learn From 2005
As the Tory government defended its preparations leading up to the worst flood in Alberta history Tuesday, two water experts said the province wasn’t ready and hadn’t learned the hard lessons from past disasters.
John Pomeroy, Canada research chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, said the warning system around flooding has proven to be deficient, while the province continues to allow development in areas at risk of flood. “I don’t think we’ve made the hard decision on that and we’re paying the price now,” the University of Saskatchewan professor said in an interview.
“When you get floods of this magnitude now, our older approaches simply don’t work and avoidance has to be part of what we do — and by avoiding, that means flood plain development restrictions.”
EDIT
What Alberta has experienced in this past week was unprecedented: More rain, more quickly over a larger area than has ever been seen before in this province. No report or recommendation looking at the lessons of the past could have prepared us for this event,” she said. But Pomeroy, who was at his Canmore home during the flood, said he and fellow researchers were aware last Wednesday that “we were in really big trouble” because of heavy rainfall, but the flood warning only came on Thursday morning. “You want a flood warning to come before the flood,” Pomeroy said. “And we didn’t have that. “We had our learning experience in 2005, but we didn’t learn from it.”
EDIT
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/politics/Province+prepared+flood+water+experts/8578874/story.html
