Councillor, residents in storm-battered areas remain angry over 'too-slow' response
Ottawa residents and local councillors are criticizing the city's slow emergency response to a severe Canada Day rainstorm. The storm caused significant flooding, with some areas experiencing a one-in-200-year weather event.
Why it matters
Highlights the challenges of municipal disaster management and infrastructure resilience in the face of increasingly extreme weather events.
Between 50 and 150 millimetres of rain fell in many parts of the city on July 1, according to a Saturday memo to council from Tammy Rose, the city's general manager of infrastructure and water services.
In the Britannia area, rain gauges measured more than 167 millimetres of rain over the course of just five hours, making it a one-in-200-year weather event, Rose wrote.
As of Friday morning, the city had received more than 5,400 service requests through 311, Rose said in her memo, with roughly four in ten coming from College ward.
That's Coun. Laine Johnson's ward. In an email Thursday to her fellow councillors, she called the response from the city "unacceptable."
"It’s too slow. It’s too long. We have an emergency services department and an emergency response program. But I’ve learned that the city was slow to make the decisions that would activate that response," she wrote.
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