What Canada’s largest city is doing to help reduce flood insurance claims

As climate experts forecast more frequent extreme rain events, Toronto is working towards protecting properties by modernizing its storm drainage system.

With its Basement Flooding Protection Program, Toronto’s city government brought in a new standard of accommodating a one-in-100-year storm instead of a one-in-five-year storm.

Initially the program consisted of engineering studies in 31 areas that had “significant flooding during storms in May, 2000 and August, 2005,” Toronto Water said in an earlier report.

The program was expanded to cover the entire city in 2013. This is because on July 8, 2013, a late afternoon thunderstorm in the Toronto area, which lasted more than an hour, caused Canada’s fourth most expensive insured loss ever at nearly $1 billion — mainly from sewer backup claims.

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