For a year and half the community of Canmore has gone through a process of learning more about its mountain creeks, their risks and hazards and what mitigations are possible to prevent another devastating debris flood similar to what happened on Cougar Creek in 2013.
But it wasn’t until council’s meeting this Tuesday night (Jan. 20) that elected officials voted to support or not support the recommended solution of a debris flood retention structure above the subdivision of Cougar Creek.
While council voted in support of proposed mitigation and its $37 million budget, it wasn’t a unanimous decision as concerns around the type of mitigation and the financial implications were expressed by Councillors Vi Sandford and Ed Russell, who voted against the motion.
“Personally I don’t like dams and many people in this community have expressed this to me as well,” Sandford said. “I think they are a simple solution to a complex problem.”
She added with a debris net and mitigation in place since 2013, Cougar Creek is better protected than it was before for a one-in-300 year event and a different approach than building a structure upstream in the watershed is needed.
“I think it is time to change direction on this dam building and do what we can to mitigate by engineering the creekbed and in the footprint of the Town of Canmore.”
Russell said the unknown cost of annual maintenance and no clear source for where those funds would come from has left him concerned about the financial consequences the mitigation would have for taxpayers.
“I have obviously voiced some skepticism through this and it is probably the most detailed project I have ever seen,” he said. “I don’t know if there are any better answers out there, but the bottom end of the problem for me is how are we going to pay the bills?”
Mayor John Borrowman said the cost of rebuilding homes along Cougar Creek when another debris flood occurs without long-term mitigation is more of a concern than continued maintenance of a retention structure.
“We have to understand what the long-term cost is to our society when rebuilding after annual events compared against the relatively low cost of annual maintenance,” he said.
The mayor said with what council knows now after 18 months of analysis to understand what happened, the risk and hazard, it has an obligation to act on that information.
“We can’t just hope we won’t get a major event,” he said.
Coun. Sean Krausert took issue with categorizing the structure as just a dam.
“A dam is a water retention structure, this is a debris retention structure,” he said. “Dams may be going out of style for a reason, but they are designed to permanently hold back water. We are dealing with something entirely different here.”
Councillors Esmé Comfort and Joanna McCallum said they appreciated the work administration and the consultants have done to make the science and research accessible to the community when it is a complicated subject matter.
McCallum noted the project has been peer reviewed by experts in their fields of study and is not being undertaken out of fear.
“I was not elected to sit on my hands, I was elected to make decisions with regards to the safety of our community,” she said. “This decision is not a decision based on fear, it is a decision based on data and science, which is more than we can say about some levels of government.”
The $37 million budget breakdown has the Town of Canmore contributing $4 million from its general capital reserves, $18 million from a Flood Recovery and Erosion Control provincial grant, $4 million from Alberta Transportation and $11 million from the Alberta Community Resilience Program.
However, while politicians in Edmonton have expressed support for the direction, the $4 million from transportation and $11 million from municipal affairs are not officially confirmed. Canmore does, however, have the $18 million from the FREC grant in the bank.
“The downturn from the energy crisis has precipitated delays in future funding commitments, but we remain confident the province will continue to support seeing the project to completion,” said Andy Esarte, manager of engineering for the municipality.
The mayor said the municipality has enough funding available now to continue the process of designing mitigation and prepare a shovel-ready project for when full funding is secured.
“With the $22 million or so we have in the bank between FREC and the Town of Canmore’s contribution, we are more than able to see this project through for a couple of years anyways,” he said. “We did make it clear (through a motion of council) that we cannot proceed without a commitment of funding regardless of how it flows.”
Esarte has been working exclusively on flood mitigation since June 20, 2013 and he said in that time administration and its consultants have established sound science and policy to fully understand the risk and hazard mountain creeks have for the community.
“We can be proud of the work we have done as a community to recover from the flood,” he told council. “And that after 18 months we now have more answers than questions.”
BGC Engineering and Mattias Jakob were brought on immediately to conduct a forensic analysis to understand what happened on Cougar Creek. Out of that, an in-depth field investigation and detailed hazard and risk assessment were done.
While the 2013 event carried 90,000 cubic metres of debris in a debris flood of Cougar Creek, analysis showed an even worse catastrophic event is possible in that watershed: a landslide dam outbreak flood.
Esarte and Jakob presented the details of what that looks like throughout 2014, but essentially it is when a dam forms in the watershed from rockfall and then water and debris backs up behind it. When it breaks or fails, the result is a landslide outbreak flood and it can carry up to hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of debris – putting much of Cougar Creek at risk. The proposed 30-metre high structure is designed to stop 650,000 cubic metres of water and sediment.
Knowing the worst possible scenario – Esarte said the analysis of what level of risk is acceptable led to Austrian consultants Alpinfra recommending the option of a debris flood retention structure – which would mitigate for that worst case possible event.
Esarte said Canmore is leading the way in developing policy to look at land use through a hazard and risk assessment approach as Natural Resources Canada and the province are also moving in that direction.
In fact, he said the province’s recently drafted guidelines for steep creek assessments for urban development were influenced by the work done on Cougar Creek.
“Risk-based approaches are the future of public policy for people acting in this field,” he said. “We are at the forefront of this policy development.”
Russell, however, had an issue with the approach being more of an actuarial exercise an insurance company would do.
“I am worried about committing the Town of Canmore way over our heads as far as money,” he said. “Nobody wants to lose lives or see catastrophic loss of everything … but this is an actuarial exercise.”
With council’s approval of the project came a followup motion authorizing administration to proceed with an environmental impact assessment and detailed design of the mitigation – two processes that are expected to be lengthy, complicated and have a budget of up to $3 million.
Esarte said the process will refine the design, minimize maintenance, maximize value, reduce risks, update costs, get permits and result in a shovel ready project to put to tender. The $3 million is made of up $2.5 million in grants already received from the province, $231,000 from Canmore and $231,000 from Alberta Transportation.
