Toronto faces backlog of hundreds of basement flooding and sewer blockage calls | CBC News

Toronto is still grappling with the aftermath of last week’s record rainfall, with city staff working through a backlog of hundreds of basement flooding and sewer blockage calls.

Nearly a week after the intense rainfall and flooding, the terrible impact continues to be felt by both homeowners and businesses, and work is underway to inspect city roads and bridges swamped by the storm.

The final cost of the flood to taxpayers has yet to be determined. 

“Toronto Water made a lot of progress over the weekend in responding to reports of basement flooding (and) overflowing catch basins, and has been able to revise its service response time,” city spokesperson Laura McQuillan said in a statement. 

And while the time to deploy a technician has come down, waits of between 48 to 72 hours remain.

Last Tuesday, parts of the city saw more than 100 millimetres of rainfall in a torrential downpour that flooded homes, streets and major highways including the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway. At the height of the storm, 167,000 Toronto Hydro customers were without power.

As of Monday morning, the city had received nearly 1,400 requests to clear sewer connection blockages, with almost 1,100 resolved and more than 180 still pending.

City staff also received 66 calls for overflowing catch basins, with 23 resolved and 43 of those requests still pending.

In all, the city received nearly 3,000 calls related to the rainfall and flooding.

Workers are also continuing city-wide inspections of bridges and culverts affected by the storm. All critical structures close to Lake Ontario, and about 75 per cent of water crossings, have been inspected with “no significant” structural concerns observed, staff said.

“Further monitoring or maintenance activities will be coordinated based on our inspection results, which include clearing debris, cleaning catch basins and repairing eroded areas,” McQuillan said.

Departments continue to work on storm response: Chow

Mayor Olivia Chow said Monday that a broad swath of city departments continue to respond to the major storm, including shelter services and public health.

Chow and Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie have asked city staff to report back on storm water mitigation programs in light of the impacts of last week’s storm. City council is set to debate that motion this week, with an eye to helping identify more ways to help homeowners and businesses avoid flooding.

“What can we do to have less storm water runoff, especially in a big parking lot?” Chow said. “It becomes a parking lake when a huge storm comes.” 

Chow also wouldn’t rule out the city taking additional steps to help those affected by the severe storms at a council meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

“The flood is hard on everyone, especially those that don’t have a home, especially those that need to find food in a food bank,” she said. “So, we’ll see what we can do to assist that.”

More aggressive action needed: councillor

Changes to the city’s storm water and waste water management system have been proposed several times over the past decade but have proved controversial. Online critics, including Donald Trump Jr., seized on the Toronto proposal earlier this year, dubbing it a “rain tax.” Chow paused consultations on the proposed changes.

Coun. Dianne Saxe, who once served as Ontario’s environmental commissioner, has been pushing city council to take more aggressive action to address the impacts of climate change. 

“We know that climate change makes the storms fiercer, we know that means more intense rainfall, more all at once,” she said. “We know we have to give the water department enough money to deal with this overwhelming amount of water that’s going to keep coming.”

Saxe said she’s working on proposals for council that could address short-comings in the city’s current storm water diversion plans. Council must explore ways to have the owners of large parking lots either keep more water that runs off their property or pay for the burden it creates when it rushes into the city sewers or storm sewers, she said.

“The only way to turn that around is to give them a financial incentive to keep the water on their own property, which they do not do,” she said. 

Saxe said the city should also be planting more trees and examining the path of the floods to design mitigation measures accordingly.

“What smart cities do is they build places for the water to go and we know where water wants to go,” she said. “It wants to go basically everywhere where there used to be a creek and we know where those are.”