Gord Nascimento installing a number of flood barriers around his home in hopes of staving off another rush of rainwater like the one that caused more than $300,000 in damage last August.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
A year after a summer storm dumped 190 millimetres of rain over two days on the Windsor-Essex region, Gord Nascimento has been busy installing a number of flood barriers around his home in hopes of staving off another rush of rainwater like the one that caused more than $300,000 in damage last August.
In the past 10 months, he has built a concrete enclosure around his walkout basement entrance, dug an outdoor sump pump ditch where excess water can flow into an 5-1/2-metre gravel trough and be pumped into a water reservoir 30 metres away. His newest addition is a metre-high concrete berm around a portion of his home.
The motivation is twofold. Earlier this year, when renewing his home insurance, Mr. Nascimento was told that as a result of his 2023 claim, his $750,000 coverage for overland flood protection had been cut to just $30,000.
Then, in early June, his insurance company sent a notice stating that all policyholders had to install certain flood-prevention measures – such as a battery backup pump – by June, 2025, or their overland flood coverage would be cancelled altogether. (He already had installed a generator and sewage backup).
“I remember a major flood we had in 1989 and it made me extremely cautious” so he purchased extra flood insurance, Mr. Nascimento said in an interview. “Most people didn’t think another one-in-100-year storm could happen again so soon. But thankfully I did because I would have had to gut my basement and leave it empty. I can’t afford to put all that money into it again after we just finished our home several years ago.”
In addition to last year’s storm, the city of Windsor and surrounding area also saw major damaging storms in 2016 and 2017. Surrounded by three bodies of water – Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River – it is known as one of Ontario’s most flood-prone areas. Over the past decade, the city’s low flood plain – along with an increase in the frequency of severe weather events – has contributed to a spike in major water damage for the region.
A view of the concrete berm Gord Nascimento is building around a portion of his home on Roseborough Rd. in Harrow, Ont., on June 21.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
As a result, insurers have been reassessing if certain neighborhoods are too risky to underwrite.
Overland flood or groundwater coverage protects a policy holder from a sudden accumulation of water from a heavy rainfall or an overflowing river that typically enters the home through the basement walls or lower-level doors.
“Our modelling shows that Windsor is an area that is particularly high risk and that is why flood insurance can be pricey or simply unavailable for much of the city,” Craig Stewart, vice-president of climate change at the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), said an interview.
Windsor’s low-lying area that is subject to intense rainfall is only part of the reason for the risk, Mr. Stewart added. The other factor is that the region’s wetlands have been drained for development. About 95 per cent of the wetlands around Windsor have been drained for agricultural purposes or for building subdivisions.
“As a result, those subdivisions – which frankly probably shouldn’t be there – are subject to runoff and to intense rainfall events more so than most other places in Ontario,” Mr. Stewart said.
For insurers, flooding has become the biggest climate-related risk.
The IBC said it has not seen a widespread pullback for flood coverage in the Windsor region. Many of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurers – including Aviva Canada, Intact Financial, TD Insurance and Co-operators Group Ltd. – confirmed they have not pulled out of the Windsor market for overland flood coverage. However, some companies said there could be situations with individual homeowners where a change in their risk level could change a policy at renewal.
Co-operators is one of the few insurers that sells comprehensive water coverage for higher-risk clients – including residents in the path of hurricane storm surges. (Many policies do not include water damage from seawater).
“Overland flooding has been identified as one of the most costly losses of damage for Canadian homes,” Michelle Laidlaw, associate vice-president of national product portfolio at Co-operators, said in an interview. “But there’s still a significant portion of the population in high-risk areas that don’t have access to adequate coverage.”
Disaster claims in Canada have more than quadrupled over the past 15 years, accounting for $3.1-billion of insured losses in 2023, up from just $400-million in 2008, according to the IBC.
In 2016 and 2017, the city of Windsor suffered two major back-to-back severe storms that led to insurers paying out more than $300-million in water damages.
This has led to Windsor residents paying hefty premiums for home insurance – an estimated average of $2,139, according to a 2022 report by RATESDOTCA. That is the second-highest premium in the province behind only Lasalle, a town about 20 minutes outside of downtown Windsor that has an average premium of $2,411.
Blair Feltmate, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, also attributes the rising cost of insurance to higher interest rates, the destruction of natural forestation and a strained labour market that affects rebuilding and restoration costs.
He said Windsor is at the top of the list of Canadian cities to be hit hard by climate change, particularly flooding and extreme heat. As a result, new residents should be aware of the type of flooding that occurs in certain neighborhoods when looking to move.
“Many homeowners who may move into an area only look at river flooding rather than urban flooding, which occurs when major precipitation falls on a city, collects on the landscape and eventually enter basements through ground-level windows, or build up in a sewer system and come into basement drains,” Mr. Feltmate said in an interview. “A person may assume they are free of flood risk – when they are not.”
About 10 per cent of homes in Canada, or 1.5 million, are uninsurable for flood risk today. It is a number that industry experts expects to grow.
However, there are situations where homeowners can help improve their eligibility for coverage, says Danny Da Costa, an Intact executive who oversees insurance in Ontario.
Last year, the company saw twice as many Windsor homeowners gain eligibility for flood insurance compared to the number who became ineligible. While there are many factors that attribute to the increase in eligibility, including advanced flood mapping, Mr. Da Costa says infrastructure improvements play an important role.
“In the Windsor area, we improved the eligibility by 8 per cent.” Mr. Da Costa said in an interview. “Right now, the majority of our customers in Windsor do have eligibility for flood coverage – close to 80 per cent. So we moved the needle quite a bit there.”
For Mr. Nascimento, who has spent close to $75,000 in preventive measures, it will be several years before he can reapply for an increase in coverage.
“I was prepared to see a decline in coverage due to submitting the first claim – the first one ever in my life,” he added. “I’ve done all the upgrades I can in hopes of going back to the table. But I know I’m going to pay dearly for that coverage if they ever give it back to me.”