It has been two-years since Toronto was struck with one of the most disastrous and damaging floods the city has ever seen. On August 07, 2018, Toronto’s downtown core was blindsided by an unprecedented amount of rainfall that caused dramatic flash flood and significant damage to homes and businesses.
Two-years later, Jim Mandeville (pictured), senior project manager at FirstOnSite Restoration, reflects on the catastrophe: “It started fairly innocuously. We’re all used to big thunderstorms in this part of the country. They come and they go, it rains hard […] and we usually don’t think too much about it. But this was a lot of rain in a very concentrated area, and it just absolutely overwhelmed all of the infrastructure in that small area of downtown Toronto. And the other key part is, it happened in a very short period of time. Our infrastructure is designed to handle lots of water, just not necessarily all at once. It really wasn’t something we were expecting or planning for; it just came out of nowhere and hit us and our customers completely without warning.”
The flash flood required a large and complicated response. While events like this are FirstOnSite Restoration’s forte, Mandeville admitted there were challenges to navigate, especially in terms of logistics and accessibility. Toronto’s downtown core is “the opposite of accessible” when it comes to dealing with large-scale events, he said, even for simple things like bringing in dumpsters to haul garbage away or setting up unit response hubs.
Fast-forward to August 2020, and Toronto’s downtown core is a completely different place. It’s a relative ghost town due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the decision made by most large businesses to keep their employees working remotely for the foreseeable future. If another ‘100-year flood’ were to strike the city of Toronto today – or in the past few months when the public health crisis was at its peak – it would be a whole different story to the fateful flood two-years-ago.
Mandeville commented: “Like every other business, we’ve had to adapt some of our approaches to be able to effectively function in this new environment. We still obviously require a lot of people to clean up a big mess, so we’ve had to make some adjustments to how we structure our crews - everybody works in teams and those teams work separately – and how we take breaks and take lunch. We have to ensure there’s some social distancing and keep our small teams apart, and even within those small teams, we have to keep the workers apart. We’ve also had to substantially increase our personal protective equipment.
“On the other side of things, because a lot of those businesses are closed and presumably not reopening very soon, that makes responding to something like a flood event somewhat easier because we’re not trying to work around the existing business or our customer trying to operate. It makes the response a little bit easier on that side, but the logistical and operational management aspect of having to conduct such a large response during a pandemic is a real challenge.”
While Toronto has dodged any significant flash flooding so far through the pandemic, the same, unfortunately, cannot be said for other parts of Canada. Alberta, especially, has been hit hard by spring floods and hailstorms. On April 27, Fort McMurray’s downtown core was evacuated after a 25-kilometre ice jam on the Athabasca River triggered a massive flood. FirstOnSite Restoration was on the scene for recovery, but as Mandeville pointed out: “It was very challenging maintaining social distancing and organizing all of our crews into groups so that we could track [people’s movements] in case there were to be a problem … but it’s part of the new normal.”
He told Insurance Business: “Because of social distancing, we generally require more people than we would have before. I know that sounds somewhat counterintuitive, but because we need to spread people out and the efficiencies aren’t as efficient as they were prior to this, we do require some more people and that can be a bit of a challenge. Also, [it can be tricky sourcing] general labourers and getting enough people willing to do these dirty jobs because a lot of people aren’t as interested in coming to work in the current risk environment. Fortunately, our existing relationships and existing trade base are very strong across the country, and, because of our national reach, we’re able to leverage providers and labour forces from further afield and bring them in. But it’s definitely challenging; it’s a lot harder than it was before.”
