Double trouble: Hamilton’s beach strip braces for flooding amid the COVID-19 lockdown

It's a sunny day in May but water is still seeping into John Elliott's beach strip basement and pooling on the street just steps from his home.

The water is coming up through the floor, but we're pumping it out OK so far," said Elliott, who like most residents on low-lying Bayside Avenue has a sump pump spitting water onto the road every few minutes.

I've lived here (on the strip) all of my life, so I'm used to this. But it would be nice if we could stay dry this year, you know?"

Lake Ontario is on the rise and again invading homes in what has become an annual rite of spring for the sandbar community squeezed in between the lake and Burlington bay.

But this year's COVID-19 pandemic lockdown has prompted the city to get an early start installing pumps on flood-prone streets, contracting sucker trucks and writing warning letters to residents. After all, self-isolation stinks even more with a smelly basement.

So far, the news is mixed for anxious beach strip residents watching water levels tracked by the International Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Board.

Lake Ontario started off the year nearly 20 centimetres higher than normal, but the international body that regulates flows out of the lake via the Moses-Saunders dam opened up the taps for several months to help keep levels from rising too quickly.

Right now, forecasts call for peak water levels in late May or early June that would be well above average - but still below last year's trail-swamping record of 75.92 metres above sea level.

Regardless, we are already nearing the lake level at which basement flooding and road ponding" becomes common on the strip, even in good weather, said city water director Andrew Grice. That magic number locally is around 75.5 metres above sea level.

Storm-fueled winds can magnify the impact of high water levels, creating monster waves that chomp bites out of trails, throw rocks around and claw sandy beaches out of existence for months at a time.

We still have to prepare for the possibility that it could be just as ugly as last year," said Grice, noting the city spent close to $4 million on flood mitigation in 2019, including using vacuum trucks to clear flooded streets. I fully expect that we'll be out in mid-May doing what we can to dry things out."

To start, the city is installing temporary pumps at the end of streets like Bayside that force pooled water through drowned pipes under the QEW and into Burlington bay.

(This year, the city is trying to find quieter" pumps - a move cheered by Elliott, who said his daughter could barely sleep at night last spring with the machinery churning.)

The city is also sending letters to all beach residents pleading with them not to pump Lake Ontario from their basement into the laundry tubs that drain into sanitary sewers.

Last year, so much water entered the sanitary sewer - the pipes that send flushed sewage to the treatment plant - that the system was nearly overwhelmed," said ward Coun. Chad Collins.

We've learned that diverting lake water to the wrong place could have disastrous consequences," he said. We're talking about the potential to flood dozens of homes with raw sewage."

Long-term, the city is studying a potential permanent, multimillion-dollar pumping station that would protect particularly vulnerable streets from default flooding. Don't expect to see the results until next year, however.

Matthew Van Dongen is a Hamilton-based reporter covering transportation for The Spectator. Reach him via email: mvandongen@thespec.com