jamesq | In Which James Imitates Chicken Little.

I heard an interesting set of rumours on the Internet today. No cites, so take them with a grain of salt.

Given that Alberta has had about twice the amount of snow (so far) that it normally gets, they're already starting to speculate about flooding. Note that it's not even spring yet.
Climate change suggests that we're moving into a generation-long wet trend locally before moving into severe drought after I'm dead. This suggests that flooding may become a regular thing.
Calgary spent all of it's post-flood efforts last year simply repairing the damage. We have a plan for handling future floods. Mostly this consists of moving the berms along the riverbanks out so that the effective flood plain has a much larger volume to absorb water into.
The new flood plan is still entirely in the planning/approving stage and not in the implementation stage.

If we get hit with another spring flood approaching the magnitude of last year's, it will once again cause damage that we scramble to fix over the summer. Once winter hits, we can't really fix much of anything.

Are we in for several years of vicious circle, where we can't prevent future floods because we're spending so much effort repairing the previous floods? I hope not, but it means acting soon so that we can take advantage of any mild years in the next decade. We need to acknowledge that "lucky" (as in, if there are no floods in the next few years, we got lucky) is not the same as "normal" and prepare.