As Torontonians tally flood damage triggered by Tuesday’s rainstorm, a city official says such increasingly frequent deluges will beat a drainage system with pipes more than a century old.“The numbers we’re talking about in terms of rainfall were absolutely astronomical in a very short period of time,” Frank Quarisa, acting general manager for Toronto Water, told the Star Thursday.“We’re talking about overland flooding — water that didn’t even make its way to the sewers in many cases and eventually it made it to the storm sewers after having flooded out street areas ...“We’re talking rainfall levels in these core areas of the city far in excess of what any kind of infrastructure that we have in the ground, or even the road infrastructure, can handle.”The intense storm forced occupants of a floating car to swim for safety, trapped men in an elevator with water rising to their necks until swimming police officers rescued them, turned condo parking lots into raging rivers and sent streetcar passengers paddling out through sewage-laden runoff.Read more:Flash flooding has created sickening mess in Toronto Harbour, water-monitoring group saysOpinion | Editorial: Toronto politicians can’t hide from the increasingly extreme weather The city does fix failing infrastructure, but replacing — as a precaution — pipes as old as 120 years buried deep beneath busy streets is “huge in terms of dollar value and disruption,” Quarisa said, so “you have to come up with adaptive measures to get around it, ways to deal with that storm water that makes its way to the sewers.”Most of Toronto’s sewers are combined, meaning in heavy rainfall runoff mixes with sewage from homes and businesses, and often spills into waterways or backs up into basements.The “adaptive” measures include Toronto’s wet weather flow master plan, to improve water quality along shoreli ...
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