Are clean-up costs a better deal than platinum flood-proofing plan for Edmonton?

Edmonton city councillors are wondering if they should go “all in” on what would be a platinum flood mitigation plan, preparing for the mother of all storms.

The issue holding them up? Knowing that the extensive cost for home and business owners might be prohibitive.

Friday, the utility committee mulled over the concept of going for something less expensive, and having insurance and other programs clean up the mess after the fact.

“What is the sweet spot?” asked Mayor Don Iveson, who is open to the idea of backing away from a plan that was first unveiled Monday.

That plan offers four options costing between $2.6 billion and $4.7 billion. The administration is pushing to $2.6 billion option, saying climate change is making storms more severe and intense than in the past.

How the city grades a storm has doubled. What we used to consider a one-in-100-year storm is now graded at one-in-50 years, meaning what, at one point was a one per cent chance of it happening, that same intensity of storm now has a two per cent chance of hitting us.

Iveson wondered if it’s more cost effective to have money for cleanup after the fact than invest in prevention.

“Is that better shared on the insurance side as a long shot risk versus what’s real and likely that we should be hardening infrastructure against?”

It’s a question shared by Coun. Ben Henderson.

“There’s a point of which it may be cheaper to do the repair afterwards than to guard against something from a risk point of view that’s very unlikely to happen.

“I think we really need to do that work and understand at what point it makes more sense to be proactive and when it may make more financial sense to reactive.”

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“Somebody needs to crunch those numbers before we start making these decisions and I don’t know if anybody’s doing that right now,” Henderson continued. “I’m sure the insurance companies are but we have a responsibility too and I’ve always argued one way or another as governments we can’t have our cake and eat it.

“We either have to be prepared to clean up after the mess, or we should be finding out a way to make sure the mess never happens.”

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Members of the utility committee passed a motion to ask the province and the feds to weigh in, as well as the insurance industry.

Epcor will present city council a list of options on flood proofing in 2018.