We can't prevent disasters, nor change human nature

Like millions of people who live in cities that have been built along rivers, I live on a floodplain.

There hasn't been a flood in Red Deer to equal that of Calgary or High River in all our written history. But if you sink a spade just about anywhere on what remains of natural ground in our valley centre, you'll find evidence the Red Deer River once flowed there.

I've been told the area where I live, near the base of Michener Hill, was once called the Chinese Garden, for the family-run market garden that for a time was a local landmark.

It's a good place to have a garden, because there's no bottom to the topsoil here. It's all river silt (with patches of gravel) deeper than any basement foundation. My garden makes it look like I know what I'm doing there.

A long time ago, the Red Deer River flowed right below Michener Hill. Over time, it moved slightly north, leaving behind the oxbow lakes in the Gaetz Lakes Sanctuary. But while it was moving, it must have flooded many times, leaving behind a legacy of deep fertile silt on a pancake-flat valley bottom.

Good place for a garden, or a town. Right?

Adrian Gordon is the former president and CEO of the non-profit Canadian Centre for Excellence in Emergency Preparedness. The centre just happened to be running an international conference in Toronto this week, becoming the go-to place for journalists looking for perspective on Alberta's new natural disaster.

The gist of what he and others are telling reporters is this: Canada's network of public infrastructure, valued at about a trillion dollars, is not hardened against natural disaster events that we know have happened in the past, and that we know will happen again.

Think about the ice storm in Quebec a few years back. It downed all the power lines, caused massive blackouts, and hundreds of millions in losses and damage to property.

Quebec responded as we all would — they cleaned up, fixed up, restored the lines. All that new infrastructure is standing there, waiting for the next ice storm — which we know could happen any given year.

The power lines could have been buried, but that was considered too expensive. More costly than replacing them all again, the next time the weather turns ugly?

That observation contains the subtext of what Gordon and other emergency preparedness experts are saying about Calgary. Make that all of the Canadian prairies.

If 100-year floods now happen every 10 years, why should people like me be allowed to return to our homes on the floodplain?

Insurance companies are asking the same question. They answer it by saying they won't insure homes on floodplains against the kind of flooding nobody even remembers seeing before.

But that doesn't stop people like me from living in these areas. Biblical-level flooding wasn't on the radar when we moved here 35 years ago.

Looking at how many people live in the valley, and how many businesses have grown here, it hasn't been for anyone else, either.

We've never had a Calgary-level flood, with muddy water above basement ceilings, enough to make the entire downtown a no-go zone. But as we have seen, that's not evidence we never will.

Delegates to the Toronto conference have their own data on major disasters around the world. In no case, we are told, are local or national governments completely ready to deal with these events.

In fact, no government anywhere is keeping up with the cost of maintaining infrastructure — roads, bridges, power, water supply — under even normal conditions. Whatever developments we are making are almost all pay-it-forward, never mind paying for recovery from a multi-billion-dollar disaster loss.

Garrington Bridge west of Bowden is just one of thousands of weak links in the transportation chain, in zones where flooding has occurred in the past and where it will probably occur again.

The town of Sundre knows full well how a river can move when the mountains get too much rain all at once.

But would Sundre move? Would Calgary homeowners dealing with a horrible, stinking, muddy mess right now? Would Vancouver, sitting along a geological fault line ripe for an earthquake? Would I?

Human nature trumps Mother Nature, at least in the decisions we make.

The Canadian Centre for Excellence in Emergency Preparedness is doing a very good job, but the tide of human nature is as strong as the tides of the Earth.

The best we can expect is that people make decisions, knowing all the risks.