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A second water resources engineer at the City of Ottawa is raising flags about the development of Kanata West because of concerns about possible flooding.
Darlene Conway, in a witness statement filed at an Ontario Municipal Board hearing on Kanata West, says that she found major errors in the water modelling done for the development, near Scotiabank Place.
Engineer Ted Cooper has already gone public with his concerns about possible flooding in Kanata West and one of his two appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board is being heard this week.
In her statement, Ms. Conway, an engineer with 20 years’ experience, said she has two major concerns about Kanata West: that the project has gone ahead on the basis of water modelling that was not properly calibrated or validated; and that the analyses supporting development suggested there will be reduced flood levels after the building happens.
In December and January, she reviewed the work done by consultants Totten Simms Hubicki and compared the pre-development water runoff with the post-development runoff. She saw that the consultants were projecting water flow will decrease with development, which she called “a physical impossibility.” Then she found a number of coding errors in the modelling that suggest future flood levels will be lower once the land is developed.
When she re-ran the models, she found water levels would be 0.2 metres or 0.3 metres higher.
She said of particular concern in Kanata are the two Highway 417 bridges at Kanata that have insufficient clearance between the flood elevation and the bottom of the bridge. Ministry of Transportation design standards require one metre of clearance to reduce the chance that debris will collect and threaten the bridge during floods. The bridges only have 0.4 metres of clearance.
“Any increase in flood levels will further threaten these structures,” she said in the statement.
It’s the discovery of these errors that led the City of Ottawa to warn the Ontario government last month not to make final decisions on Kanata West until the city double-checks the flood-control information with its own independent engineering consultant. The lands owned by Mattamy Homes in Kanata West, however, are not affected.
Mr. Cooper is appealing the rezoning of 17 hectares of rural and agricultural land just north of Hazeldean Road at the Carp River. The Trinity Development Group wants to build big stores on the land and has allowed for the relocation and improvement of Hazeldean Creek and the presence of a transit corridor and station in its plans. Part of the land is considered vulnerable to flooding and won’t be built upon, at least until it is determined no flooding will happen.
Mr. Cooper is concerned that incorrect analysis of the flooding situation in Kanata West could mean that the projections of where the flood plain is could be incorrect and the health and safety of residents who move into the area could be at risk. He says that placement of the flood plain line in the current plans is based on work that was completed in 1983 and doesn’t account for the changes that have happened in the area.
But when he tried Thursday to explore the issue of the flood plain, with Ms. Conway as his only witness, the Ontario Municipal Board member running the hearing, Susan Schiller, stopped him cold.
Ms. Schiller said it wasn’t the municipal board’s job to say whether the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority was right in the way it draws its flood plain line. Rather, she said, the board could only decide the merits of the city’s zoning bylaw for the land.
When Mr. Cooper persisted in trying to get evidence in about the flood plain, and the process that’s supposed to delineate it, Ms. Schiller lost patience.
“No more. No more using this process to do a back-door challenge to the conservation authority,” she said, chastising Mr. Cooper for being argumentative and abruptly adjourning for a 20-minute break.
When the hearing resumed Mr. Cooper, a legal neophyte who didn’t know what reply evidence was until Thursday, carried on but struggled with his lack of legal experience.
“Are you engaged in another speech here?” Ms. Schiller asked at one point. Later, she said “No, no, no,” and told Mr. Cooper that he was “perilously close to misusing this process.”
Mr. Cooper said he was disappointed that he could not deal in evidence with his flooding concerns about Kanata West, which he believes are critical to the question of what the land should be used for. He noted that he can’t appeal the flood-plain decisions of the conservation authority.
Late in the day Mr. Cooper wanted to refer to the city’s official plan and a section that he had forgotten about earlier that might have helped his case. But Ms. Schiller ruled it out of order because his case had already been presented. She expressed surprise that a water engineer with the city would not know the official plan thoroughly.
“You are simply not credible,” she said.
While Ms. Conway was not allowed to testify in detail about the flood plain of Kanata West, she did make it clear at the hearing that building should not be permitted in flood plain. She said there are times when building on “flood fringe” lands can be permitted under very strict conditions, but only when it is in an established community, such as Constance Bay, that was built before Ontario’s flood-plain development rules came into being. She said a more strict approach is proper in new or “greenfield” developments, where there should be no development on any land where flooding might happen.
She also testified that putting a lot of buildings and asphalt along the Carp River will significantly increase the amount of runoff water during storms.
Donald Herweyer, the city’s planning manager for the Kanata area, said the concept of using flood fringe is permitted by both provincial and city rules. He said that once the building happens, the Carp River restoration project will improve the flow of water and reduce the chance of flooding significantly. A big question, however, is how far down the river the restoration will be. Environmentalists say the work needs to go all the way down to Carp Village, but that will cost many millions of dollars.
Arguments on the case are to be made Friday morning. Opposing Mr. Cooper are City of Ottawa lawyer Tim Marc and Trinity Development lawyer Joel Farber.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008