Burlington homeowner: insurance won’t cover flooding

(Update)
The extent of the damage from Burlington’s flood disaster is mounting steadily. The city’s mayor is now suggesting as many as two-thousand homes may have been affected. And many of those homeowners may not be covered by insurance.

This is the area along Tuck Creek in Burlington’s New Street-Walkers Line area. A neighbourhood of tree-lined streets and comfortable suburban houses. Here and in other parts of the city, people are still living with the mud and raw sewage swept into their homes by the catastrophic floods almost two full days ago. And if their insurance won’t pay to repair the damage, they’re wondering who will.

This is just one of the houses along Elwood Rood that was swamped when Tuck Creek overflowed its banks during the storm creating virtual lakes and sending three or four feet of floodwater across lawns and into people’s houses.

Mark Pawlovich, house flooded: “The water just started coming around gushing around filled up the back and came around the front.”

Mark Pawlovich and his family just moved here earlier this year from Toronto. Now they’re dealing with extensive damage in their house and garage-workshop and being told their insurance probably will not cover it.

Insurance pays for backed up sewers — if the homeowner pays for the extra insurance. But not for floodwater that comes across land.

Mark: “Anything that comes in through windows or doors that they could say is a creek or just torrential rain apparently is not covered.”

If that’s the final insurance verdict, it leaves Mark and his family stuck with a massive bill as they start their new life in Burlington.

Mark: “Then we’re in — I don’t want to say anything too bad but we’re in trouble, trouble yeah.”

But the flooding in Mark’s neighbourhood was around trees that neighbours say fell during the storm — damning the creek.

Whose responsibility do you think this is with the water? “It’s the city’s.”

Lis and Tom Alton say insurance won’t pay for their flood damage either, and say the city had been told about the trees: “Two years ago they were supposed to do something about tuck creek but the city never followed up, the city never followed up.”

Inspecting the area, Mayor Rick Goldring says the liability issue hasn’t been decided.

Would the city be liable for help in a case like that? Mayor Rick Goldring: “That’s a legal question and I’m not a lawyer and I’m not going to answer.”

Goldring also says the number of homes flooded Monday is now probably between 15-hundred and two-thousand. And he wants to see if there’s help for other people falling through the cracks of insurance coverage.

Like Laura Bennie: “There was sewage everywhere the basement was covered.”

She has insurance but living on a disability pension can’t afford the thousand-dollar deductible.

“It’s a nightmare. everything, we’re, we all have no clothes to wear.”

What you’re looking at now is the tree or trees that damned the creek at the centre of the flooding in this neighbourhood. As for what happens next, the mayor isn’t saying anything for now about helping people pay for flood damage. Or whether some kind of disaster declaration would bring any help. But he’s meeting with the province tomorrow and says there will be much more to say about this on Friday.