As Londoners brace for cooler temperatures and possible snowfall later this week, city crews continue to clean up the damage left by last week’s weather.
Several areas of the city were flooded after a weeks worth of rain fell in a matter of days and milder weather resulted in the thawing of snow banks and ice jams in the river.
Scott Stafford, the city’s managing director of parks and recreation, said the estimated cost of the damage to city parks, pools, and playgrounds, is somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000.
“Playground surfaces, all those chips that make the playgrounds safe and soft when you’re coming down the slides, those need to be replaced in a lot of flood-plain areas,” he said.
Stafford says they’ll need to add sand to some baseball diamonds, and fix pathways along the Thames River that’ve been washed out.
Among the expenses are new pool heaters at both Thames Park and Gibbons Park too.
“We’ve had staff out there evaluating what’s happened,” Stafford said. “We typically have some spring flooding as well, so we are used to that a little bit, but we’re trying to chip away at those areas that really only happen during the more extreme floods.”
Environment Canada says rain is expected on Thursday, and it’ll turn into snow. Some areas might get as much as 15 centimetres of snow.