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Bryan Ezako boats to his home near St. Francis Xavier, Man., May 9, 2011.JOHN WOODS/The Canadian Press

From a ferocious wildfire that ravaged a small Alberta town to a powerful twister that tore apart heritage buildings in Ontario, this year's wild weather has been one of Canada's costliest.

The final tally won't be known for some time, but insurance payouts for property damaged by severe weather have already climbed to nearly $1.5-billion, not far off the record set during the ice storms of 1998 – which cost $1.8-billion when adjusted for inflation.

The $1-billion mark used to be exceptional, said Robert Tremblay, director of research with the Insurance Bureau of Canada. This year, however, marks the third in a row that weather-related destruction has topped or neared that level.

"Unfortunately, it has become a yearly occurrence and so now we have to wonder where it will it go from here," Mr. Tremblay said.

The insurance bureau's figures do not include hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid doled out by governments for natural disasters insurers won't cover, such as flooding. Compensation claims connected to Manitoba's unprecedented spring flooding could alone top $1-billion, significantly adding to the province's deficit, Premier Greg Selinger said recently.

If leading international climate scientists are right, these kinds of weather extremes – storms, floods, heat waves and droughts – will become more frequent as the Earth's temperature rises. Economic losses will continue to mount unless governments, businesses and residents better prepare for the predicted increase in natural disasters, said Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, an independent research institute established by the insurance industry and affiliated with the University of Western Ontario in London.

"We have to build more resilient communities," Mr. McGillivray said. "One of the concerns that we have is the building code is based on historical weather. It's not very helpful to build something that is supposed to last for 100 years on weather from the past."

Globally, 2011 was the second-costliest on record for weather catastrophes. The United States, which grappled with hundreds of tornadoes and wildfires, experienced a dozen natural disasters that each caused at least $1-billion in damage this year, the country's greatest number of high-cost weather events in 30 years of government tracking. (More than 600 people died in the disasters.)

Climate change isn't the only reason natural disasters are becoming more expensive, Mr. McGillivray said. Canadians own more goods than they used to and live in denser communities. Much of the country's infrastructure is old and wasn't designed to handle storms of increasing intensity.

"There's a huge difference between 35 millimetres of rain falling over three days and 35 millimetres of rain falling in three hours," Mr. Tremblay noted. "When you're having the rainfall coming very quickly, it overwhelms the storm and sanitary infrastructure."

Canada is the only G8 country where flood insurance is not available to homeowners. The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction is advocating for change, contending an insurance program would encourage flood-prevention measures and reduce financial strain on governments.

Economic hardship was a theme common to many of the 134 weather events senior climatologist David Phillips reviewed to draft Environment Canada's top weather stories of the year. Massive flooding in Manitoba and Saskatchewan topped the list released Thursday. Several rivers and lakes rose to new peaks in the two Prairie provinces, closing hundreds of roads and forcing thousands of people to flee their homes.

"We've never seen so much land under water," said Mr. Phillips, who has for 16 years compiled Canada's list of big weather events. "The flood went on forever. … They were talking about it from October of last year through to when the military left flood duty in late July. It wasn't just a weather event, it was an economic hit, too."

The most expensive insured disaster of 2011 was the May blaze that devastated the small northern Alberta town of Slave Lake. A pilot died fighting the wildfire after his helicopter crashed into a lake. The fire scorched 4,700 hectares of land and destroyed 400 buildings, mostly houses. Payouts for property damage have reached $700-million.

Although provincial government officials suspect the wildfire was deliberately set and have turned over the investigation to the RCMP, the blaze was named the second-biggest weather story. Mr. Phillips noted extremely dry conditions and winds clocking up to 120 kilometres an hour greatly fuelled the flames' destructive path.

"The whole town was threatened. It's just miraculous people got out," Mr. Phillips said.

At home and abroad, responding to weather catastrophes makes up a large part of the Canadian Red Cross's work. Hossam Elsharkawi, the organization's director of emergencies and recovery for international operations, said it's not just the severity of weather that is prompting concern in the developing world. Changes in rainfall patterns are posing new challenges in Western Africa, for instance. The growing and harvesting of bamboo, an important construction material, has been thrown out of whack in some regions, he said.

"They're getting weather conditions they've never seen before," Mr. Elsharkawi noted. "They're not necessarily very severe, but because they have not seen anything like it before there is no community resilience and know-how on how to deal with it."



Top insured weather-related damage of 2011

Slave Lake wildfires

Although provincial government officials suspect the northern Alberta blaze was deliberately set, extremely dry conditions and winds clocking up to 120 kilometres an hour helped fuel the fire. Around 400 buildings, mostly houses, were destroyed. Insured damage has reached $700-million, the most expensive disaster this year and the second costliest in Canadian history after the 1998 ice storms that hit Quebec and Ontario.

Wind, rain and tornado

Wickedly strong winds and thunderstorms in April caused about $210-million in property damage in southwestern Ontario and parts of Quebec. Less costly but more dramatic was the August tornado that ripped through the Ontario lakeside community of Goderich. Insured damage has been pegged at $185-million. "It looked like a bomb went off in the community. It was absolutely unreal," long-time Goderich Mayor Deb Shewfelt recalled in an interview this week. He said 16 businesses have had to find new space to operate in and more than 30 wrecked houses are still waiting to be demolished.

Alberta winds

For a few days in late November, it seemed as if the wind would never die down in southern Alberta. Some of the most powerful gusts ever recorded – ranging from 117 km/h in Lethbridge to 204 km/h at a home weather station in Pincher Creek – shattered office-tower windows in Calgary, peeled the roof off a high-school gymnasium in Nanton and pushed at least eight vehicles off the highway. Insured damage has reached at least $200-million.

Sources: Insurance Bureau of Canada and Environment Canada

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