Aerial photos of 2019 flooding

[gmarshall]

I was able to take a few hundred shots of the flooding of the Ottawa River on Monday April 29th.

Not customer photos or anything, so I thought I'd share then online for personal viewing.

http://aerialphotographs.ca/flood2019

[McKellarDweller]

^^ I appreciate the post. Thank you, gmarshall!

[Horus]

Those are fantastic pictures! Thanks for that

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by gmarshall

I was able to take a few hundred shots of the flooding of the Ottawa River on Monday April 29th.

Not customer photos or anything, so I thought I'd share then online for personal viewing.

http://aerialphotographs.ca/flood2019

Great photos..I think I recognize where most of them taken....is there any link that would be able to show exactly where they were all taken?

[gmarshall]

Originally Posted by Proof Sheet

Great photos..I think I recognize where most of them taken....is there any link that would be able to show exactly where they were all taken?

Sorry, only one of my cameras is GPS enabled and I was switching back and forth, so I didn't record that in the metadata.

On top of that, if the photo is tagged via GPS, the location is always recorded where the camera is, not where the subject is, which when flying at 3000' can be a kilometre or two away from the aircraft.

I'm sitting on the right side of the airplane, and we started by overflying downtown from the west, headed east along the river out to Cumberland, turning around and flying all the way back to Constance Bay. At the end we did a couple orbits to get shots on both side of the river.

Between knowing the context of the shots and using Google Earth you can usually pin point the locations.

If it had been a paying gig and I had a customer willing to cover the hours required to correctly geolocate all the photos, I could have taken the time to update their locations.

[Arcologist]

Great photos, thanks for sharing.

It certainly hits home when you're on the ground near one of the flood zones. I was at Britannia yesterday, and while I had seen photos on the news, it was a completely different experience when there in person. I was blown away by the height of the water!

It's going to be a loooong cleanup process. And once that's done comes time to reflect on how to prevent these sorts of events in the future. The 1-in-100-yr floods are now far too frequent to ignore.

A few things come to mind:

- Tackling the root of the problem: climate change. It's time to look at serious measures to combat the effects of climate change. People may not like carbon taxes and the like, but they're necessary, and perhaps even too little to change anything.
- Buying out flood zone construction and prohibiting future development in such zones.
- Flood-proofing (berms, dams, canals, raise elevations, etc.)
- Curb urban sprawl. Having denser cities allows resources to be pooled in smaller areas when they do become affected by natural disasters, rather than spread across vast areas.

I'm sure there are more measures that can be taken, but it becomes more evident with each passing year that SOMETHING has to be done.

[J.OT13]

Agreed. We need to get to the root of the problem, and 5 cents extra on gas, which is mostly coming back to taxpayers instead of used towards climate-change initiatives, isn't going to do much.

Will somebody please come up with a real plan! The Conservatives are wasting time fighting a carbon-tax that's barely effecting prices, the Liberals talk big, but don't do much. Is the NDP still a thing? and the Greens have no chance of getting enough seats at the Fed level t make a difference.

[acottawa]

There was a good article in the citizen about previous floods in a lot of the affected neighbourhoods. It was just expected that houses would flood from time to time.

[acottawa]

The root cause here is people building inappropriate houses in inappropriate locations.

[J.OT13]

My father lived by the river in Gatineau as a kid. His parents are still there. Over the course of 50+ years, they had only experienced two floods. Since 2017, they've endured two major floods.

Floods happen, but the frequency and severeness has increased dramatically. The Tornadoes last summer were also highly unusual. Last one of that magnitude in the Ottawa area was in the 1980s in Masson. We'll see if those happen more frequently as well.

There are many more examples of global warming, far more catastrophic than what we're seeing in Ottawa.

[CityTech]

The kind of flooding seen in the last few years dwarves anything seen previously. Consider also that the reservoirs that hold back a lot of the meltwater from the north reduce the peak flood levels a lot more than any pre-modern events. When that is factored in, 2017 and 2019 are both more severe than anything that ever happened since Europeans first arrived here. We're talking centuries of normal patterns upended.

[acottawa]

Whether it happens twice in two years or twice in 50 years, houses should not be built in these areas (unless they are 1920s cottages that are designed to be flooded from time to time).

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Whether it happens twice in two years or twice in 50 years, houses should not be built in these areas (unless they are 1920s cottages that are designed to be flooded from time to time).

In the case of my dad's parents, it was originally a small cottage across the street from the river and they built it up over time. Some modifications were made to prevent further flooding after the second one, which sufficed for 20-30 years up until 2017.

A place that was safe, or relatively safe for decades or even centuries might no longer be today. I agree that we should consider re-locating businesses and people along the (new and old) flood plains, and at the very least stop approving any new development. Governments are doing this now however, we also need to tackle climate change.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

In the case of my dad's parents, it was originally a small cottage across the street from the river and they built it up over time. Some modifications were made to prevent further flooding after the second one, which sufficed for 20-30 years up until 2017.

A place that was safe, or relatively safe for decades or even centuries might no longer be today. I agree that we should consider re-locating businesses and people along the (new and old) flood plains, and at the very least stop approving any new development. Governments are doing this now however, we also need to tackle climate change.

It probably flooded twice in the 70s, in the 50s and in the 20s before that. It is great that your family got a few dry decades, but it sounds like your grandparents had the right idea in terms of the best use of the site.

[Arcologist]

I completely agree that many houses in 100-yr flood zones that were once deemed "safe" may no longer be so. Climate change means our 100-yr flood zones are expanding, and with that will come the necessary migration to "new safe" areas. It doesn't make sense to rebuild in these areas; governments cannot be expected to continue to cover the costs of these natural disasters because residents can no longer get private home insurance.

IMO, if private insurance doesn't want to give you flood insurance, and you build/rebuild anyways, you should be on your own. It's not a nice thing to say, but neither is it fair to expect taxpayers to cover the costs.

Having said that, many of the homes experiencing floods in 2017 and 2019 have been there for decades and never experienced flooding like we have in recent years. It makes sense in this case for the government to offer buyouts. I would even go so far as to say that governments should be permitted to force residents out of flood zones.

The crappy thing is, things are only going to get worse the longer we wait to take action on climate change...