High water levels mark a concern for Riverside residents

By Manvir Kaur

Area residents living close to the river’s edge are concerned about high water.

Lake Erie’s water level was around 60 centimetres above average at the starting of March, four centimetres higher than last year. Lake Ontario’s level at the beginning of the same month was around 40 centimetres above average.

Penny Morand has been living in her close-to-the-lake cottage for the last 65 years.

According to Morand, during high water levels there is always a burst of flooding. Morand said people who live along the lake do not have flood insurance. If water floods their houses they cannot make an insurance claim.

Morand said the insurance company will not provide coverage because they consider the area a flood plain. Many people have put steel or brick walls up to keep the water back from flooding. But it does not always work and it depends on how high the waves get.

“If you live in flood plain, where there is potential of the lake overflowing its boundaries, you cannot get house insurance for flooding,” said Morand. “If a house burned down, there is fire insurance but there is no flood insurance.

“We always worry that another big storm might come up and the houses flood, like what happened in 1973. Flood water was so deep it was about one-foot-and-a-half high in the house. No cars get up and down the road. We had to go down to our cottage by walking on the railroad-tracks, and of course, when the water pulled back, there were all kinds of debris and silt and sand left in the house on the floors.”

She said people have to clean their homes themselves unless they hire expensive companies to come and clean up for them. Morand said she believes the flooding is no longer a cyclical thing, but it has more to do with climate change.

“You would need to be at least a mile away to have a house that would be protected from the flood,” said Morand, adding that during a severe storm she thinks the water could come kilometres up onto the mainland.

Giovanni Abati is the Green Party representative for Windsor-Tecumseh and thinks the government could be doing more.

“Our government should create a kind of program offering emergency response strategies for specific climate emergencies,” said Abati. “This will have to be related to climate change patterns, like increased rainfall and changing weather.”

Abati said he thinks that people not covered by insurance should receive government compensation in the event of an environmental disaster.

“The only way this can happen is with a disaster relief kind of fund,” said Abati. “I do not know how much but it should see how much flood damage happened. More than just giving money to people, we need to work on putting in berms and reinforcing shorelines.”

Abati says the causes for flooding are numerous. Winds coming from the south-east in Lake Erie is one major cause, because these winds push the water onto the shorelines of the Detroit River.

According to Abati, The Green Party first and foremost wants to stop global warming.

He said they want to stop subsidizing oil and gas companies and they would reinvest that money into creating barriers where the water can be stored, splitting water into little rivers like Belle River and Puce. Also, they would create ponds that would act as water reservoirs to prevent flooding and to build up shorelines and break walls.