Last winter, the United States got a harsh lesson in what happens to an area that doesn’t do the necessary work to upgrade and maintain its infrastructure in the face of climate change.
Over the course of a few days in February, 2021, 3.2 million people lost power in Texas as the temperature plunged to nearly -30C in some areas. At least 200 people died, some estimates put the number much higher.
As a record cold front swept through the state, residents turned up the thermostat on the electric heating that is used to warm almost every home. However, at the same time, wind turbines froze, as did water and natural gas sources for the generation plants, which removed them from the power supply. Pipes in the South Texas Nuclear plant froze also froze, taking it offline as well.
In short, Texas, in one of its coldest winters on record, faced a massive power supply shortage at a time when keeping warm was a matter of life and death.
Texas’ power grid had been separated from the main US grids for decades in an effort to cut costs and avoid regulation. Regulation that governed things like preventative maintenance and preparation for the type of cold events it was then experiencing.
In fact, a similar cold snap in 1989 had led to much of the same equipment failing in the cold, but nothing had been done in the intervening years to prevent a repeat.
But it turns out the rest of North America’s power grid is not in much better shape. The average person in Japan experiences 4 minutes a year of power outages, where in some parts of the U.S. it’s over 90.
In Ontario, the average resident experiences just under 5 power outages a year, with the average length being just under three hours.
But extreme cold (caused by a climate change fueled wobbly jet stream) in places that don’t expect it isn’t the only problem. Heat, and its effects on vital infrastructure can be much worse.
At the height of June’s heat dome event that saw temperatures in the west spike up to almost 50C, Portland was forced to shut down its LRT line as the components that ran it simply started to melt in the heat. The sun started burning holes in power cables.
Similarly, in 2015 Metrolinx slowed service across much of the GO Transit network in Southern Ontario because of sun kinks, a cheery euphemism for warps in the tracks due to extreme heat.
As Rebecca Solnit pointed out in her recent Guardian piece, we are well into the Anthropocene epoch with roads, bridges, sewer systems and power grids that were designed for the Holocene.
So as the sun returns to the west to bring baking temperatures once again, and the clouds dump six inches of rain on Detroit in a single night, flooding every freeway in the city, is it time that cities anticipate what’s to come when designing or repairing their infrastructure?
For years, governments across the western world have been focused on efficiency. Delivering the most services possible with the least amount of infrastructure, people, and money. The pandemic of the past 18 months laid bare the problems with such an approach, as here in Canada we discovered that we had little to no domestic supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) and no onshore vaccine manufacturing at all. Efficiency quickly translated to vulnerability when things didn’t go as planned.
Some jurisdictions are slowly changing their tune. The Economist reported in June that the UK was turning its back on a decades long pursuit of efficiency, and focusing on resilience, at least in terms of disaster preparation.
The problem with resilience is that it is expensive. Jurisdictions that have created resilience have only done so with costly backup systems that may go years without being used. Paying for such systems is a tough sell in cash strapped municipalities where ‘zero percent property tax increase’ promises are often the key to re-election.
Yet municipalities and provinces that don’t invest in resilient infrastructure can face serious difficulty, or even widespread loss of life, when cheap, efficient systems fail.
As countries like Canada and the US work to rebuild economies that have been devastated by the pandemic, governments are looking to invest heavily in infrastructure. These proposals have the added benefit of addressing the state-of-good-repair backlog that exists throughout North America, with medium sized cities like Hamilton facing a $2 billion deficit in the budget required to bring all of their infrastructure up to modern standards.
It is not enough to build roadways and sewers that fail during so called 100 year storms, when those storms are now occurring every few years. The infrastructure we build, and upgrade today needs to be 40 to 40 resilient. Able to handle every temperature and weather extreme from -40C to 40C, and everything in between.
40 to 40 infrastructure is already being introduced in places like Mississauga, Ontario, where the Credit Valley conservation authority has implemented a sweeping set of regulations around stormwater management that have reduced run off into the credit river by 80%, and dramatically decreased the presence of heavy metals in the water.
It’s also being built in places like the Netherlands with their Room for the River program which is slowly expanding both the width and depth of their dyke network to accommodate greater flows of water without the surrounding towns and cities becoming flooded.
In southern Ontario, there four cities that are building, or scheduled to soon build Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems. We know from the lessons of Portland and the GO Transit experience that extreme heat can paralyze these systems that people rely on to get to work, school, or even life-saving community cooling centres and pools.
Similarly, extreme cold can play havoc with track switches and signal infrastructure. Over the past decade, GO Transit has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars installing natural gas heat blowers over vital switches that melt the ice that falls from the wheel systems and prevents the switches from being set. Are similar costs being considered for the LRT programs?
The cost of hardening these systems against -40 to 40 degree weather changes does not appear to have been factored into the plans so far, but may become an important consideration as the final discussions on construction and maintenance costs take place in a summer of headline grabbing extreme weather events.
Finally, elements such as storm water surcharges that tax properties according to how much storm water run-off they produce can encourage the use of permeable surfaces in paving and reduce unnecessarily large parking lots. They can also fund vital improvements in storm water management to prevent flooding and sewage discharge into water ways.
In the end, the world we have built our roads, sewers and power grid for is fast disappearing, replaced by an often hotter, sometimes colder, and much stormier planet. It is long past time that those responsible for maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure invest the money necessary to ensure that these services are available when we need them the most.
New Normals
Every ten years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases what it calls climate normals for the United States. These are ten-year summaries of both temperature and rainfall against the 20th century average gathered from thousands of data producing weather stations across America. The first was completed in 1901 and they have been released every ten years since then.
It should come as no surprise that America is getting hotter, but the degree to which the temperatures have increased and the speed at which it has done so in the past few years is alarming.
The collection of temperature maps shows a pleasantly cool blue, which represents below average temperatures for the first 7 or 8 periods measured, and then over the past 20 years progresses rapidly to nearly solid red across the country.
Further data for the wake up call that America seems to be slowly starting to heed.
Gaia Bites Back
Multiple news sources reported this week that the rapid permafrost melt occurring in Alaska is threatening an above ground section of the Trans-Alaska pipeline, one of the world’s largest.
The section is on a slope which is starting to melt and slide downhill as the frozen tundra it is built on thaws in record heat.
While the arctic is heating many times faster than the rest of the world, permafrost is an especially dramatic example, as any infrastructure built on top of it finds itself sinking into the muck as the ground rises in temperature.
Pipeline owners will attempt to rescue the section in question by drilling tubes into the side of the hill to siphon out the heat. This has only been used successfully on permafrost that hasn’t started melting yet, so it remains to be seen if the effort will be successful.
Go Bags for BC Wildfires
As discussed on the Environmental Urbanist podcast this week, the BC Government is now recommending go bags for residents in areas that may be subject to forest fires.
Once the purview of hardcore preppers and survivalists, the idea of a bag near the door one can grab in case of an emergency evacuation has long been suggested as a tool for surviving the sudden collapse of the social order that survivalists have been inaccurately predicting for decades.
The BC Provincial government recommendations are somewhat more prosaic, suggesting items such as a cell phone and charger, a change of clothes, snacks and any medication needed.
As my guest on the show this week Michael Nabert explained, we are now entering a world that doesn’t just have unprecedented natural disasters, but multiple unprecedented disasters happening at the same time. Evacuations orders can be sudden, and emergency services can become quickly overwhelmed, as they were in BC during the heat dome event.
As Michael said on the show, a strong community and knowing your neighbours is the best solution, but if the time comes to evacuate, knowing you’ve taken a simple step like this will go a long way for your peace of mind.