Last week’s massive flash flood in Burlington, Ontario shows that Canadians must prepare for a “new breed” of storms, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist Dave Phillips told CBC last week. “These 50-year floods are occurring every 10 years, because our climate has changed,” Phillips said. When the Burlington storm hit a week ago, the city received 190 millimetres (more than six inches) of rain—nearly 2½ months’ precipitation—in two hours, with very little on either side of the city and none in nearby Hamilton. “The kind of storm that you saw on Monday, there’s no infrastructure around that could handle that,” Phillips told CBC. “Because of climate change, it could very well be that the performance of our infrastructure is not living up to what it was designed for.”
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