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| Flooded Calgary Stampede Grounds |
Today I have a lecture on extreme flooding in my
Hydroclimatology class, which seems appropriate with all the extreme weather
we’ve seen this year. But to me, “extreme” means that it rarely occurs and
flooding doesn’t exactly seem rare right now. Crews are still working to clean
up Calgary from the extreme flooding they’ve had and Toronto saw flash flooding
on Monday after 123mm of rain fell within a few hours, breaking the previous
rainfall record set by Hurricane Hazel in 1954, and many people in Toronto
still remain without hydro today.
On the other side of the world,
western China has also experienced extreme flooding, affecting more than 360,000 people,
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| Floods in Western China |
but most of those areas are even less equipped to deal with flooding than Canada due to lack of infrastructure regulations. The heavy rainfall in China has also resulted in multiple landslides in areas with heavy deforestation, which erodes the soil, and 30-40 people were buried in one landslide.
Dr. Blair Feltmate, Program
Director of Sustainability Practice at the University of Waterloo, argues that
the extreme rain we’ve been seeing lately will no longer be rare; it is the new
norm. He says we need to predict where the most affected areas will be and
adapt to prevent disasters, rather than dealing with them as they occur.
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| Flooded GO Train, Toronto |
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says “It’s
mother nature, right? All we can do is cope with it.” Yet I disagree. We need
to take action to prevent damage from these types of weather events, especially
since they’ll be occurring more frequently. As awful as floods have been this
year, I hope that they can help people realize that climate change is an issue
and one that is not only going to affect the Global South; it is affecting us
in Canada too. Do you think that these flooding events will help to bring
climate change closer to home and force people to change their behaviour, or
will people continue their lives as normal with the attitude that there’s
nothing we can do anyways?
