Cars are partially submerged in flood waters in the Don Valley following heavy rain in July. Big infrastructure projects designed to mitigate flooding in the city will take decades to complete.
Cars are partially submerged in flood waters in the Don Valley following heavy rain in July. Big infrastructure projects designed to mitigate flooding in the city will take decades to complete.
By now, the endlessness of the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT is so well known as to be a punchline (or maybe an adage — “when the Crosstown opens” being a synonym for the imagined time when flying pigs soar over a frozen-over hell). But many Star readers might have been surprised to learn this weekend that Toronto has another massive infrastructure project that has been in the works longer — and is projected to come into service much later — than that transit line.Â
As part of the Wet Weather Flow Master Plan first approved by city council in 2003, Toronto is constructing 22 kilometres of stormwater tunnels to prevent overflows during rainstorms. I’ve been hearing about it almost as long as I’ve been covering city politics. Originally, the concern wasn’t much about preventing the kind of flooding that’s become seminormal in Toronto, but to keep untreated sewage from flooding into the lake from our combined sewer system. Front-of-mind concerns have changed, but the project remains: construction began in 2012, and will likely continue for another decade, as my colleague Mahdis Habibinia reported on the weekend.Â
That is a loooooooong-term project. One that has come to seem all the more necessary as massive rainstorms have ramped up, even as more of the permeable surfaces of the GTA have been paved, causing massive city-stopping floods. It is a reminder that city building is the work of generations, work we need to undertake while always looking to the future.Â
In 2003, the year the plan was first approved, I remember then-mayoral candidate David Miller answering questions at an event, and saying he took inspiration from the R.C. Harris water treatment plant in the Beaches. It has been called the Palace of Purification (and is so grand and ornate that its marble finishes might remind you of a literal palace). Constructed between 1932 and 1941 for a much smaller city that was then suffering from a lack of clean drinking water, it remains in service almost a century later, its size and capacity and art deco architecture remaining a symbol of the ambitions (and foresights) of those who built it.
Miller cited that — along with that era’s public works commissioner Harris’ decision to “rough in” a subway on the Bloor Viaduct decades before Toronto ever had a subway system — as representing the kind of vision he thought the city needed. One that built infrastructure not just to serve the needs of the city that is, but as a monument to the city that will be in 50 or 100 years.Â
(And Harris did consider pieces of infrastructure to be monumental, in the artistic sense: in a speech I learned of when it was once cited by the journalist John Lorinc, Harris said “a drain well dug is as glorious as an opera or a picture.”)
Clearly when it comes to infrastructure, we’ve been playing catch-up, trying to extend our overloaded transit network, repair our crumbling roads, retrofit our aging and overloaded stormwater system (some of which has been in use since Harris built it). And as both our ongoing transit and stormwater projects might remind us all too well, it is not quick work.
And while we’re waiting for it to be done, we get reminders — like the flooding this year that we’re becoming all too used to even as it costs us billions in lost time and physical damage — that even that work is not likely to be adequate to solve the problems we are experiencing today, never mind those our children and grandchildren will face in this city down the road.Â
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Which means our leaders today need to be doing more now to build for the needs those future generations will inherit, looking at how the city will need to adapt to a changing climate, a growing population and technological innovation. It isn’t cheap, but the cost should be thought of as amortized over the decades any good project will be used. Besides, history teaches us that a project postponed does not see its cost go down — the cheapest time to build infrastructure is always in the past.
And that is the only time a project we need now could be successfully started, if it is the kind of project that takes decades to complete. We need to look ahead to the needs of the city in the decades to come, because that is when construction on the things we start building today will be finished.
Politics is not particularly good at the art of delayed gratification. But when it comes to big infrastructure projects, that is the only kind of gratification there is.
