St. Catharines, Ontario is grappling with the aftermath of severe flooding after a second major storm in less than a week battered the city. Residents described the latest deluge as an even bigger flood than the first, and the aftermath of more than 140 millimetres of rain could be seen across the city's streets, where piles of ruined furniture, carpets and toys were left outside homes.
For many families the damage has been devastating. One resident, who is five and a half months pregnant and has a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, said her family cannot live in their home right now, and that thousands of dollars worth of baby items and children's belongings had been destroyed. She described the ordeal as deeply stressful as they tried to clean up while insurance companies and cleaners struggled to keep pace with the demand.
The city said the ground was already saturated after the first storm, and by Sunday the drainage system was overwhelmed. The rapid succession of heavy rainfall left little time for the water to recede before the second storm arrived, compounding the damage across neighbourhoods that had only just begun to dry out.
Overwhelmed by the damage to their home, some residents are now calling for a third-party review into potential gaps in preparedness. One affected resident argued that if the failures came down to infrastructure, that needs to be known, insisting the underlying causes of the repeated flooding should be examined rather than left unexplained.
St. Catharines has declared a state of emergency, and the province is stepping in to support recovery efforts. The city's mayor said he wanted to focus on the bigger picture, warning that it may take disasters like this one to get federal and provincial officials to take notice that infrastructure, especially water and wastewater systems, needs to be renewed at a much faster rate.
In the meantime, residents are anxious about how they will cover the cost of filing two insurance claims in a single week. Some worried aloud about spending more money on insurance only to be dropped, while others noted that disaster claims often do not cover sewage backups, leaving them uncertain about how much of the loss they will ultimately be able to recover.