Fiona’s power sounds warning for future

As Atlantic Canada works to clean up the devastation brought by posttropical storm Fiona, lessons from her brutal winds and waves should be used to secure the region against future storms, experts say.

Though much has been learned from previous storms to help the region better prepare for onslaughts like Fiona’s, Kevin Quigley, a professor of public policy and director of the MacEachen Institute at Dalhousie University, said more work must be done.

“It’s hard to hold people to account in the middle of a crisis. The attention has to be on helping and saving people,” Quigley said. “But once that period’s over, we need to have a bigger conversation about improving response for the next time.”

As one of the strongest storms on record to hit the East Coast, Fiona left at least three people dead as waves swept away homes in Newfoundland, wind gusts toppled trees and telephone poles, and a half a million people were left without power.

On Monday, the military was deployed to P.E.I., Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, while a navy ship was dispatched to do wellness checks in remote Newfoundland communities.

“We always benchmark ourselves against Juan,” Quigley said about the 2003 hurricane. “We’ve come a long way, but we need to commit ourselves to learning and improving for future storms.”

However, rather than simply comparing this storm response to past ones, public authorities should be anticipating future storms and the evolving needs of the aging population, he said.

This is especially important because storms will hit the Atlantic Provinces harder than they have in the past, said Blair Greenan, a research scientist with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Due to local geology, he said, those provinces will face greater sea-level rise than other parts of the country: While the land in many coastal regions, like Vancouver Island, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Hudson’s Bay, is rising, mitigating the effects of rising oceans, the land in Nova Scotia and parts of New Brunswick and Newfoundland is sinking, making every millimetre of storm surge worse.

“It’s a unique situation in Canada,” Greenan said. “Atlantic Canada is one of the highest-risk areas in Canada for sea-level rise. Planning for infrastructure is most important here.”

Average sea levels in Halifax Harbour have risen about 30 cm in the last century, tide-gauge data shows, and they are projected to rise somewhere between 40 and 100 cm by 2100.

This means both low and high tides are higher than they used to be, setting a higher baseline for storms to ride in on.

“The same storm coming through would breach (a seawall) when it wouldn’t have 100 years ago,” said Greenan. “And it’s only going to increase in the future.”

He and his colleagues have developed a tool called the Canadian Extreme Water Level Adaptation Tool that links global climate science to local decision making. The online tool lists more than 1,000 smallcraft harbours in Canada and projects sea level rise for each one, taking into account local geography and circumstances.

“We’re providing tools with information at local levels so people can incorporate that into their decision making,” Greenan said.

Fiona swept several people out to sea on Canada’s East Coast. A 73year-old woman’s body was found Sunday after she was swept out of Port Aux Basques, N.L., a day earlier when a massive wave hit her house, The Canadian Press reported.

One approach that governments should implement on a wider scale to protect people in the future is “managed retreat,” said Kate Sherren, a professor of environmental social science at Dalhousie University.

The policy involves moving homes away from coastlines, where they are vulnerable to destruction by storm surges, she said, adding it includes regulations about how close to the coast new buildings can be, but also moves back existing housing.

It’s a tough sell in places where people have built or are building their dream homes overlooking the sea, Sherren said. “People don’t really perceive the risk as being severe enough that it’s time to do something so severe as to actually leave where they love.”

The retreat wouldn’t be a fixed distance. In some cases it could be moving a home farther back on a piece of property; in others it could involve the government swapping a resident’s coastal property with one further inland.

Regulations are not in place now and people are still building homes too close to the water, Sherren said, adding she’s even seen homes with foundations sitting in the water. Despite how unpopular new rules may be, building in such dangerous locations must be prevented.

Usually, people become more agreeable to the idea after a major storm like Fiona, Sherren said, and this “policy window” offers an opportunity to make some progress on managed retreat.

“The emotional attachment to where people live — we all struggle to face significant changes to places that we cherish, and we all need to be empathetic about that,” she said. “But we also need to make some difficult decisions. It would be best if we could make them together.”

Despite the destruction over the weekend, there were improvements to the response compared to past years, according to Quigley.

He was quick to praise the governments of the Atlantic Provinces for their efforts informing the public before the storm hit. Since last Wednesday, local radio and television have been flooded with warnings to stock up on food and water so residents could shelter in place for 72 hours after the storm, he said.

Care centres were set up in recreation facilities across the region to give people a place to dry off and warm up. Electricity companies have been better as well, he said, with hundreds of workers put on standby to reconnect downed lines and restore power to homes and businesses.

“Emergency management is getting much better and much more sophisticated,” Quigley said. “But it still could be better.”

Cellphone service was out across wide swaths of the Atlantic Provinces, he said, and intermittent elsewhere. While few people had a mobile phone 19 years ago during Hurricane Juan, now virtually everybody is reliant on one for news, information and contact with others.

With the new dependency comes problems.

“You’re asking people to shelter at home and now they can’t get any information and they start making bad decisions,” said Quigley, noting that there were reports of people driving around looking for a cell signal before roads had been cleared of live power lines.

“People shouldn’t be doing this.”

Tide-gauge data shows average sea levels in Halifax Harbour have risen about 30 cm in the last century, and they are projected to rise somewhere between 40 and 100 cm by 2100