Another Great Flood
On May 7, 2017, the mayor of Montreal declared a state of emergency. My heart went out to all the people whose lives were devastated by the flooding. Many of those affected were friends of mine, family members, colleagues, and students (past and present). Most of life’s suffering is inescapable, and some of it is downright random, but the needless suffering caused by the flooding of 2017 was neither. If you’re planning a picnic, or pitching a tent by a river, you don’t need to take rare events into consideration; if you’re planning a community, or building a house by a river, you do.
The houses destroyed by the Great Flood of 2017 shouldn’t have been built in the first place. They shouldn’t have existed. Springtime flooding isn’t new to the Montreal area. As the history books make clear, great floods, many of them considerably larger than this one, happen at least once or twice a generation (e.g., 1861, 1886, 1974, 1987). Our forefathers took note of these rare events and wisely prohibited people from building on floodplains.
Zoning laws are almost always put into place after the disaster. Montreal lawmakers prohibited builders from building with wood within the city limits after the Great Fire of 1721. They prohibited builders from building too close to our rivers after the Great Flood of 1886. This is humanity at its best: analyzing what went wrong, learning from our mistakes, using our amazing capacity for foresight, preparing for the future. The irresponsible building that made the Great Flood of 2017 possible is, by contrast, an example of humanity at its most stupid and shortsighted.
Climate change is disrupting established weather patterns, making rare events—like floods, droughts, and forest fires—more common. Things that used to happen once a generation will happen once every five or ten years in the future. Just as you’ve got to be street smart to survive in the big city, you’ve got to be climate change smart to survive and thrive in the brave new world of the 21st century. In practice, this means, among other things, no more building on floodplains.
Pierrefonds, the worst hit part of Montreal, is a case in point. Much of it is built on an old swamp. Hard not to remember that at the moment. These construction projects were stymied back in the day, not on environmental grounds, but rather on ethical grounds. They thought it profoundly immoral to build houses on land that was subject to regular springtime flooding.
Will there be another great flood this spring? I certainly hope not. Regardless, it’s good to remember that the damage wrought by these great floods isn’t an Act of God; it’s an Act of Man. We too often blame God or Nature for our own stupidity.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here: A Love Letter to Montreal: Poems, Stories, & Essays (2020)
