^^^
I remember after the devastating Calgary floods in 2013, some dipshit on this forum said that it’s so stupid that a downtown of a major city would be built in a flood plain and that it should be moved…
it’s like, what do you even say to someone with such little perspective? Clearly they don’t have a trillion+ dollars to move the second largest office nexus and 4th largest Central population in the federation to an entirely greenfield location. So what do we do? Mitigation. Just like Winnipeg did decades ago for the same reason, mitigation is underway so that when the next “1 - 100” year flood hits within a decade or less, five people won’t be killed, two small cities won’t be destroyed, and 130,000 people won’t be evacuated.
We’ve been raising downtown above the flood plain for decades, but that clearly wasn’t enough in 2013. Now we have new barriers under construction, massive removal of earth from the rivers to ensure through-flow during floods, the city’s primary upstream dams have been modernized and have greater capacity, and the Elbow River diversion is about to begin construction.
That’s how we do it… that’s the only way we as a civilization can do it.
A much better and more apt example in the context of the BC disaster might be what the Calgary region is doing combined with the New York Harbour Barrier proposal, or the nearly identical, decades-complete Maeslantkering and Deltaworken projects of the Netherlands.