Halifax Harbour faces rising waters   (Page 1 of 3)

Global warming is giving Halifax a sinking feeling. How is the maritime city planning for a future of rising sea levels and wilder weather?

By John Demont with photography by Dan Doucette

As Hurricane Juan, a once-in-a-century storm, pounded his second-floor waterfront condominium, David Van Scoyk cowered in the dark thinking, Was this really a good idea? Six hours earlier, a firefighter had ordered Van Scoyk and his wife to evacuate their home on Bedford Basin, at the northwest end of Halifax Harbour. An experienced sailor and no stranger to bad weather, Van Scoyk had stayed put. At 1 a.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, Van Scoyk stood on his deck and peered in the direction of the approaching Category 2 hurricane, wondering what the fuss was about. Ten minutes later, with much of the Halifax waterfront a ghost town of deserted buildings with boarded-up windows, he found out.

See the projected risk of flooding in Halifax Harbour.

Juan had already felled thousands of trees, smashed cars, blown the roofs off buildings and taken lives. Van Scoyk remembers the menacing roar of the wind and the basin’s monstrous swells. A boat anchored nearby snapped its moorings, was pushed to shore and began slamming against the dock behind the Van Scoyks’ condominium. As its gyrating mast threatened to break through the back window, Van Scoyk and his wife grabbed a few possessions and headed for safety. Fallen trees made the streets impassable, so they abandoned their car and left on foot for a friend’s house a couple of kilometres away.

When they returned six hours later, the boat was on their back lawn, along with three telephone poles and the remains of a splintered wharf. The 158-kilometre winds and flooding had destroyed the unit downstairs. Four balconies in the complex, including the Van Scoyks’, were ruined. The threemetre storm surge shattered the seawall. On the grounds of the neighbouring yacht club, luxury vessels lay in stacks.

“The devastation was pretty unbelievable,” says Van Scoyk, a trim man with grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses who sells promotional material for a living. On this pleasant May morning, the temperature sits at 18°C, a 10-knot breeze arrives from the southwest and there is barely a ripple on Bedford Basin. The condominiums, wharves and seawall have long since been repaired. The debris has been removed. Everything, in other words, is back to normal. Until the next time nature plays one of its nasty jokes.

Van Scoyk points to the reinforced siding installed in his condo to withstand hurricane-strength winds. He runs a hand along a new seawall — made out of shackled concrete blocks — which is almost one metre higher than the old one. Alarmist? Tropical storms seem to hit harder than when he moved here 20 years ago, he says. Back then, the basin’s water almost never crested the wooden wharf behind his home. Now, during a full moon, nearly half a metre of water splashes over it. “Something,” he says ominously, “is definitely happening.”

Van Scoyk is right. Along Halifax’s fabled harbour — where booty-laden privateers once docked and Second World War convoys massed before departing for Europe — several things are happening. Bad-weather events are getting harsher: when storms hit, there are higher waves, stronger winds, greater devastation. If that’s not bad enough, the city’s 261-year-old working waterfront is slipping under water due to rising sea levels and a sinking land mass.

A perfect storm is blowing across Atlantic Canada. Coastal erosion rates are forecast to double in Prince Edward Island. In New Brunswick over the next century, major storm surges will hit the province’s coastline every 5 to 10 years instead of every 50 to 100 years. In Nova Scotia, the beaches on Bras d’Or Lake, Cape Breton’s saltwater inland sea, are expected to be submerged by 2045.

In Halifax, as in so many low-lying, coastal communities, the question of global warming has gone from theoretical quandary to deep-seated anxiety. The city’s planners, developers and scientists are considering how to best protect their community from its impacts. Thinking short term, Haligonians are shoring up their coastal defences. Looking to the long term, the city’s Climate SMART (Sustainable Mitigation and Adaptation Risk Toolkit) strategy, formed in partnership with the federal and provincial governments and the private sector, is aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and slowing rising temperatures.

It is an effort worth noting: Halifax’s flexible, multifaceted approach to adapting to the impacts of climate change could well be a model for how the rest of Canada can prepare for a warmer planet.

Donald Forbes sure hopes so. A bespectacled and grey-bearded scientist, a bit rumpled in appearance, Forbes likes nothing better than paddling a canoe, walking in the woods or rooting around in a cemetery or an archive where he indulges his love of all things old. Such lightness of spirit is surprising. As a Halifax-based research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, Forbes has seen first-hand what global warming has done to low-lying coastlines as near as Prince Edward Island and as far away as Fiji.