With files from Tamara de la Vega
Clean up from last week’s storm, which dumped more than 100mm of rain on some areas of Huntsville in just a few hours, has come with a heavy financial toll.
An early estimate has put the municipal cost of emergency road repairs at more than $700,000. The Town has also received more than 400 calls from residents about culverts, ditches and washouts on the municipal portions of private driveways, said Steve Hernen, the Town’s Director of Operations and Protective Services.
“We are going out to prioritize the 400 calls we got to find out what’s high, what’s low, what needs immediate attention,” said Hernen at the August 30 General Committee meeting, adding that the Town can only address issues on municipal land. Any damage that continues onto private property is the responsibility of the property owner. “We look after the culvert and the entrance into the property but we stop there… We can’t go onto private property, we don’t fix private laneways.”
The cost of emergency repairs to municipal roads was authorized by Town CAO Denise Corry. “I had to authorize repairs on infrastructure that sustained damage as a result of the rain event. There was no budget, so technically that direction was not so much in my authority, however I’m pretty sure that you’d agree that we needed to repair the roads so I went on a limb and decided to give that direction,” Corry told councillors at the August 28 regular Council meeting. “I do have spending authority, so each job that needed to be completed was in my spending authority, but we actually didn’t have a designated budget for that.”
Hernen expects to bring a report to council’s September meeting identifying the total damage caused by the storm.
On Tuesday, Town staff met with representatives from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing regarding what’s needed for the Ministry to activate the province’s Disaster Recovery Assistance Program for those affected by the storm, and what residents are required to do.
The Ministry was very, very clear that residents should do what they deem necessary in order to get their property back to where it needs to be. Because A. We don’t know if the province will activate the program, and B. It’s really the property owner’s responsibility to ensure that their property is safe and protected and usable. So the key message we got from the ministry is we as residents are responsible for our own property.
Denise Corry, Town of Huntsville CAO
The Town released a Resident Impact Survey last week to assess the degree of damage to private property. “The municipality is working with the province in hope that we can collect enough information that the minister will activate (the Disaster Recovery Assistance program), but there is nothing carved in stone that it is going to be activated. So residents are really encouraged to fix their property the way they deem necessary. I know that’s a really hard message to deliver, but at the end of the day we have to be responsible for our own property regardless of what happened. We heard that message (from the ministry) loud and clear.”
Corry added that even if the Ministry activates the assistance program, residents must first go through their own insurance company. “The Ministry will not look even at a claim unless you’ve tried to cover your initial cost through your insurance company. I can’t stress that enough,” said Corry, adding that the program is designed to cover necessities and will not cover some items. Details on the program can be found here: Disaster Recovery Assistance for Ontarians Guide.
“We strongly encourage residents to go through their insurance company, document everything, take pictures and the more that we get for the minister to consider, the more likely he’ll activate the program,” said Corry. “But do not hold off on doing necessary repairs. If you have water damage, that turns into mould and it just continues to grow. Fix what you feel needs to be fixed, call your insurance company, and educate yourself on the program.”
Councillor Dan Armour asked if, during the course of repairs, Town staff would be looking at ways to prevent the degree of roads damage in the future.
Hernen replied that even prior to this storm, Mayor Scott Aitchison had challenged him to look at how the Roads Department maintains ditches. “We’ve been working on a plan, still in preliminary stages, how we can ditch the whole community in five years,” said Hernen. “We were working on a plan to figure out how much money we would have to spend on culvert and ditching per year to try and do a full circuit of the community every five years. We are trying to look at how we prevent this.” Hernen estimates that a five-year ditching plan would cost approximately $170,000 per year.
“We’ve got to look at a more aggressive ditching program,” said Hernen. “I don’t care where you go in the community, culverts are plugged everywhere. We’ve got to find a way to go out and deal with that.”
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I note that in many areas on the smaller municipal roads that have little or no proper shoulder, that the handling of shoulder maintenance causes some significant issues.
What they do is sweep the winter sand off the paved part of the road but they stop at this point and leave this as a raised build up along the edge of the road, sometimes this gets to be 6 inches high. The grass grows into this and it becomes quite solid.
When it rains the water cannot flow off the road so it flows along the edge of the pavement, sometimes for quite long distances and forms deep puddles on the road at low points. Eventually this water finds a weak spot and flows off the road at that point but in some cases this point becomes a large wash out ad it is handling a lot of water by this time.
Also, the longitudinal flow along the edge of the pavement tends to undermine this pavement edge and then if breaks off and there is a rut right at the edge. This rut is downright dangerous to small vehicles.
The road crews try to fill this rut, but nothing really works until they bit the bullet and grade the entire shoulder edge, not an easy job with the vegetation grown into it.
This is an ongoing problem. Maybe the handling of winter sand clean up needs to be reviewed?
Some neighbours are plugging up the culvert on purpose to use the water for gardening. Do to that, our sump pump is running every 20 minutes. There must be some kind of law against this. Please investigate the culverts in our area. Thank you