Stormy weather for city budgets

By Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen, September 23, 2019

Governments across the capital region are increasingly grappling with an expensive problem that farmers and tourism businesses have faced for generations — the damage done by extreme weather.

(...)Now city planners are warning that our infrastructure is at risk from a warming climate. And protecting that infrastructure comes at great cost.

(...)Ottawa prepared a document this March (shortly before the latest flood) summarizing the threat of a changing climate to its $42 billion worth of infrastructure:

“Most existing infrastructure was not designed to withstand future climate conditions and extremes,” it says. “Older stormwater systems, for example, were not built to handle the volume of runoff resulting from extreme rainstorms, especially given the impermeability of urban development, and the lack of overland flow routes designed for flows exceeding sewer capacity.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/stormy-weather-for-city-budgets

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