Field Trip Near Ottawa to Fitzroy Harbour Town Flooded Out by Ottawa River Spring Freshet
While I visited my friend in the small town of Fitzroy Harbour west of Ottawa I walked around with Newton to assess the 2023 Ottawa River flooding. I could not keep Newton out of the flood waters, since there were numerous sticks floating around that he found irresistible to gather.
Record flooding on the Ottawa River occurred in 2019, followed closely by this year (2023) and then 2017. Within the past 7 years, the three most extensive floods of the Ottawa River have occurred, according to the record books.
This year, the Ottawa River first crested last week, after a mini-heat wave over several days wiped out a deep snow cover in Ottawa and the northern river basins in Ontario and Quebec. There was a lag of a few days for this rapid snow melt derived water to work it’s way into the river and flow downstream to Ottawa and surrounding regions, causing the initial peak.
Then, on Monday this week, we had prolonged heavy rainfall in Ottawa (over 50 mm or two inches of rainfall) and in the northern drainage basins feeding the Ottawa River. Again, there was a time lag of about 2 - 3 days, and the river crested even higher on May 4th when I filmed this video. Thankfully, the spring rains held off after Mondays deluge, so the river flooding should subside and we should be through the worst of it.
We were quite lucky that the heavy rainfall event did not happen the previous week in combination with the heat wave. If this has happened, then I think we would have had a record flooding event in Ottawa, surpassing both the 2019 and 2017 events by a wide margin.
I hope that all the sandbags that have been put around properties along the river are left in place permanently, and covered over with rocks and soil, to this act as earthen berms to mitigate future flooding that is bound to happen frequently in future years. This seems like common sense to me, which is not as common in reality as I would expect. Maybe I should refer to it as uncommon sense?
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