Calls are growing for Nova Scotia to implement a flash flood alert system after a child from the community of Wolfville died amid severe flooding last week — marking the province’s second fatal flash flooding occurrence in less than year.
Last week, police said officers received a report at about 7:40 p.m. on Thursday that a youth was pulled into a water-filled ditch at a park on Highland Avenue in the community. The child’s remains were located a few hours later, at about 11:30 p.m.
Tera Sisco’s six-year-old son, Colton, died during flash flooding that occurred in nearby West Hants in July 2023. She said she was “gutted” to learn that another family will now endure a grieving process similar to what she’s been experiencing throughout the last year.
“I’m in it and I can’t imagine. It just makes things real again,” she said during an interview with Global News on Monday.
“Ever since July started, since the first, it’s like I’m living the last moments of his life on replay, my freshest memories of Colton.”
The tail end of hurricane Beryl doused parts of western and central Nova Scotia with more than 100 mm of rain in just a few hours on Thursday. Roads and homes were flooded across an area stretching from Digby to Guysborough, Environment Canada said.
Emergency alerts were issued overnight Thursday in Digby, Annapolis, Kings and Hants counties.
A year following her son’s death, Sisco said she has little faith in Nova Scotia’s emergency alert infrastructure and thinks further development is required — resulting in her taking a different approach last week when she first became aware of flooding occurring nearby.
“I was so unsettled (on Thursday), I had a friend in the fire department come pick me up and set me in his living room because I didn’t want to be stuck at home in the dark and clueless. I was scared,” she continued.
“I didn’t trust anybody to have my back.”
Sisco said she “absolutely” believes that if an alert notifying residents of the flooding risk was issued earlier last summer, she might not be mourning her son today.
“In our case, it was very too late. Colton was dead by the time the alerts came out last year,” she explained.
“I have been talking with his dad, (and he thinks) if they had just had 15 more minutes, they feel it would have made a world of difference.”
She said if an alert was distributed prior to conditions worsening, it would’ve provided more time for people to flee the area before the flash flooding escalated.
“They didn’t have that and they needed it,” Sisco said, adding that the alert’s timeliness was even more crucial considering the worst of last year’s flooding occurred overnight when most people were sleeping.
Sisco’s son was one of four people who went missing and were later found dead after two separate vehicles became submerged in the early hours of July 22, 2023.
Jim Abraham, the first-ever manager of the Canadian Hurricane Centre said it’s well past time for Nova Scotia to build a robust prediction, detection and alert system for flash flooding.
“The system makes it really difficult to provide advance warning,” said Abraham, who is also a retired Environment Canada meteorologist.
“If the province, who’s responsible for flood warnings or alerting, doesn’t have the infrastructure to detect and predict — if there isn’t even such an official thing as a flood warning program — then, of course, it’s going to take longer.”
If the province had a well-developed flooding alert system, emergency notices likely would have been sent to people’s phones before a tragedy had already happened, Abraham said in an interview.
Such a system, he added, would also involve public education that would inform people in areas prone to flash floods about the risks, as well as which parts of their neighborhoods are especially dangerous.
Though the federal weather system issues warnings about severe weather that causes floods, provinces are responsible for any kind of flood predicting programs and warnings, Abraham said. Nova Scotia uses a provincial Emergency Management Office to gather information and issue warnings, and it gets most of its information from firefighters and police working on the ground in emergencies, he said.
“As much as I can tell, by the time … the impact of the event is recognized, it’s already almost too late to get the alert out,” he said.
As for Sisco, she has a message for the family grappling with the tragic loss of their son following last week’s flood.
“Be graceful with yourselves and hang in there. I am so sorry,” she said.
— with files from Global News’ Ella MacDonald and the Canadian Press