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Extreme impact of flooding

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The impact of flooding and erosion along Lake Erie is being highlighted in the most extreme fashion this week as residents along Erie Shore Drive are being forced to leave their homes after the municipality declared a state of emergency and will close the road on March 9.

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The decision is heart-breaking for residents who have invested financial resources and their lives into their homes. But the decision was made because a breach of the road, which doubles as a dike, would be catastrophic for both residents and their property, along with farmland and for adjacent Erieau.

The area has been the subject of numerous warnings from authorities in recent years, but the situation is now dire, and the prospect for improved conditions unlikely.

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Indeed, Jason Wintermute of the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority says levels on Erie and St. Clair are already around what they were in early spring last year.

“In April of last year at those levels, we were having issues with shoreline erosion and all that other kind of stuff, so given that we’re already there, we basically expect those same kinds of issues to be occurring this year as well,” he said.

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Projections show that Lake St. Clair is likely to reach record high levels for every month until June and is within the range of beating the record for July, which was set last year, Wintermute reports.

For Lake Erie, record high levels are predicted until May, when the water is expected to start falling. The records for June and July were also set in 2019.

Such flooding is a relatively new phenomenon for Southwestern Ontario. For the past 35 years we’ve had rather tame lake levels. As recently as 2012 and 2013 levels were so low that some boaters were expressing anxiety. But that paradigm has changed. According to Wintermute, even drought conditions this year will not be enough to return lake levels to what are considered to be average.

In protecting shoreline and public infrastructure, the cost is difficult to calculate, but there have been some horrific glimpses. A Lake Erie shoreline study in Chatham-Kent, released last November, concluded the cost to protect a 90-kilometre stretch of the shoreline could approach $1 billion.

No municipality or community – or individual homeowner – can bear such a burden and yet there appears to be little help being offered by senior governments. Perhaps they hope the problem will vanish if lake levels start dropping. But they’re not.

– Peter Epp

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