City of Powell River Council will consider adoption of the qathet Regional Coastal Flood Adaptation Strategy overview report and technical report.
At the January 31 committee of the whole meeting, manager of planning services Daniella Fergusson said she was a participant in the exercise guided by Ebbwater Consulting.
“This was a regional project to look at how our region can manage coastal flood and erosion hazards,” said Fergusson. “It was led by qathet Regional District. It was grant funded. It was a three-government project that looked at sea level rise, coastal storm floods and coastal erosion hazards, and covered science, engineering and planning. It was a complex project and took over a year to complete.”
Fergusson said the project looked at policy with the city, regional district and Tla’amin Nation, plus provincial regulations and recommendations for how to address these hazards.
She outlined that there was also an engagement side to the project and the community was spoken with to gain understanding of its priorities regarding how the three governments should address the hazards. The technical information and the engagement information were fed into two reports, which have already been adopted by the regional district.
“It’s coming forward to city council to see if we would also want to adopt the flood adaptation strategy,” said Fergusson.
Regarding community engagement, people who live on the waterfront had some different thoughts than those who don’t live on the waterfront, according to Fergusson. She said this makes sense, because those on the waterfront are directly impacted by flooding and erosion. She said Ebbwater provided some guiding principles, indicating there should be a coordinated approach by being flexible and adaptive because the coast is in flux, and there can be a sense of where storms are going to go, or how sea level rise is going to happen.
Fergusson said the strategy was built on previous work. Tetra Tech engineering firm had been working with the regional district on coastal flood mapping, and there had been some work done for the city as part of that project.
“What it showed was that it was unlikely there would be high-impact floods,” added Fergusson. “This coastal flood adaptation strategy before you today looked at those. The strategy recommends some options for how to implement the recommendations, with both high-impact, one in 200-year floods, as well as a much more likely lesser intensity flood.”
Affects on city
Fergusson said what stood out for her is that a small flood is 40 times more likely to occur in any given year compared to a large flood. The large flood accounted for a high level of sea level rise and the large flood assumed a 33 per cent higher storm surge and wave effects.
Ferguson said she wanted to outline how this affects the city. For the large flood, the two areas in Powell River boundaries that stood out were Grief Point, and also, Willingdon Beach.
“Ebbwater focused on Grief Point rather than the Willingdon Beach area because people live in Grief Point,” said Fergusson. “Ebbwater looked at critical infrastructure, such as power, water, sewer, telecommunications, people, culture, archaeological resources, and the impact to our economy.”
Fergusson said recommended next steps could include limiting additional density in areas subject to flood or erosion hazard. Another is to get back to work being done in the foreshore development permit area, which was put on hold to participate in the study process.
“Now, we’ve got a good idea of some technical things we can do collaboratively across the region so we have consistent setbacks and consistent flood construction considerations, so we can now go back to working on a development permit area in city boundaries,” said Fergusson. “There are also some broader recommendations for the whole region about how we communicate with each other for implementing this plan.”
The committee unanimously carried a motion to send the report to city council for adoption.
