Fridge Copy — Keep Handy Before the Next Storm
Flood-Ready
Checklist
What every Ottawa homeowner can control before the water rises
01 Backflow & Pumps
- Backwater valve installed and tested — not just installed onceCheck it opens/closes freely each spring
- Sump pump installed and running
- Battery or water-powered backup for the sump pumpPower usually fails exactly when you need it most
- High-water alarm in placeCatches a failure before it becomes a flood
02 Grading & Drainage
- Downspouts redirected away from the foundation
- Ground graded so water flows away from the house
- Gutters cleared of debris
- Window wells covered and clear
03 Foundation & Systems
- Weeping tile disconnected from the sanitary sewerCommon in older homes — overwhelms the system in heavy rain
- Foundation cracks sealed
- Furnace, water heater & electrical panel raised above known flood lineIf the basement has flooded before
04 Before the Storm
- Know where your main shutoffs are
- Watch the forecast — have a plan before, not during
- Photograph your basement contents for insuranceDo this now, not after
- Confirm you have a sewer backup insurance riderMost policies don't include it automatically
City & provincial help exists — but check eligibility first. RPPP rebates backwater valves & sump pumps (generally pre-2004/2012 homes only). Rain Ready Ottawa rebates downspouts & soakaway pits (Priority Retrofit Areas only). DRAO is open for the July 1 storm, deadline Nov 16, 2026.
What You Can Do While the City Figures Out What It's Doing
The July 1 storm dumped up to 167 millimetres of rain on parts of Ottawa in a few hours — a one-in-200-year event by the City's own account. More than 6,000 basement floods were reported. Over 30,000 residents lost power. Roughly 100 people were displaced from their homes. In Ward 13, the combined sewer sections running through West Rockcliffe and Manor Park sit right at the intersection of two long-standing risk factors: aging infrastructure that predates modern separated storm and sanitary systems, and a river corridor already under strain from the objectives in the Ottawa River Action Plan.
Council responded on July 15 with a package of unanimous motions: waived building permit fees for flood-related repairs, waived encroachment fees for storm-debris containers, an expanded Compassionate Grant program, and an expanded Residential Protective Plumbing Program (RPPP). That's a reasonable emergency response, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But "expand the program" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence, and residents deciding what to do with a wet basement this week don't have time to wait for staff to define what it actually means.
The catch nobody's advertising The RPPP subsidizes backwater valves and sump pumps for homeowners — but only for new installations. Read the fine print and you'll find a line that hasn't changed in any of the July 15 announcements: rebates are **not available for maintenance, repair, or replacement of existing protective plumbing devices.**
That matters most in exactly the neighbourhoods where it should matter least. A lot of the older housing stock in West Rockcliffe and Manor Park already has some form of backwater protection — installed decades ago, sized for a rainfall regime that no longer describes what actually falls on this city. Those homeowners did the responsible thing years before anyone was talking about "extreme weather events" as a monthly occurrence. Under the current rules, that responsible choice is precisely what disqualifies them from help now. The program is built to reward the first move, not to fund catching up when the first move is no longer good enough.
If council's expansion doesn't specifically address the repair-and-replacement gap, it isn't closing the hole that failed thousands of basements on July 1 — it's widening eligibility around it.
## What you can actually do this week You don't need to wait for city hall to sort out the fine print to reduce your own risk. None of this is exotic; most of it is maintenance most homeowners have simply never been prompted to think about.
**Backwater valve (backflow prevention).** This is the single device that stops sewage or storm water from surging back up through your pipes when the municipal system is overwhelmed. If you don't have one, it's the first thing to look into — indoor sanitary valves and outdoor storm valves have different eligibility rules under RPPP, so check both.
**Sump pump with battery backup.** A sump pump that only runs on grid power is a sump pump that fails during the exact kind of storm that also knocks out power to 30,000 homes. Battery backup isn't optional anymore — it's the difference between a dry basement and a flooded one during the outage that comes with the storm.
**Weeping tile disconnection.** If your foundation drainage still ties into the municipal sewer rather than draining to a sump pit, you're feeding your own basement's water — and your neighbours' — into a system that's already over capacity in a surcharge event.
**Downspouts and grading.** Redirecting downspouts away from your foundation and disconnecting them from the storm or combined sewer is free, takes an afternoon, and is now a documented eligibility requirement for the Compassionate Grant under the Rain Ready Ottawa program. Check that your lot still slopes away from the house — settling over decades can quietly reverse this.
**Foundation maintenance.** Cracks and gaps are entry points. A basic annual inspection catches small problems before a 118mm rain event turns them into expensive ones.
**Utility elevation.** If you're rebuilding after this storm, or renovating anyway, elevating furnaces, water heaters, and electrical panels above expected flood lines is cheap insurance against the next event costing you your mechanicals a second time.
## The paperwork, briefly - **Report to 311 immediately** — this starts the clock for the Compassionate Grant, and the City has extended the reporting window from one to three months for the July 1 event specifically.
- **File your insurance claim first** — DRAO (the province's disaster assistance program) deducts insurance proceeds from what it will cover, so your claim outcome shapes everything downstream.
- **Keep every receipt and photo.** Reimbursement runs entirely on paper trail. - **Apply for RPPP participation** if you're installing new protective plumbing — it's also now a documented input to a stronger Compassionate Grant application. ## Why this is on a campaign blog and not just a homeowner's checklist
I write about capital projects, transit oversight, and council votes because the pattern is always the same: the city is fluent in announcing "support" and much less fluent in defining who it actually reaches. An expanded program that still excludes repair and replacement isn't a technicality — it's a policy choice that will quietly determine which of your neighbours get help and which don't, and nobody voted on that distinction out loud.
Residents shouldn't need to become forensic readers of program eligibility criteria to find out whether the city's flood response actually applies to their street. That's not a rain problem. That's an infrastructure and communication problem, and it's the kind of thing I think Ward 13 deserves a councillor who tracks closely enough to flag before residents find out the hard way — with a wet basement and a rejected application.
