I'm in Burnaby. It was really rainy and windy for a couple days, but I haven't been meaningfully impacted so far.
For sure it was a major storm with some major impacts, but I think most people in the lower mainland weren't severely impacted.
For sure it was a major storm with some major impacts, but I think most people in the lower mainland weren't severely impacted.
I'm reading now that there's already some stress due to displacements from the Lytton fire earlier this year, and displacements from Abbotsford, Merritt, etc are not gonna help the situation. I'm still trying to piece together the wider scope of the incident and don't yet have a good sense of what the overall damage looks like (though it increasingly looks like it isn't merely "a few key bridges happened to have flooded, it'll be fine once the water recedes" and it's more like "there are several landslides blocking roads along the route to Calgary and we're gonna be scrambling to staff the clean up efforts in time for winter").
On the one hand, you just need enough room for a truck to pass through, dirt road carved by a tractor as it might be, in order to establish a supply line. On the other hand, given that some communities barely only ever had that in the first place, I imagine many might need to figure out plan B arrangements.
Bridges and huge sections of the most important highways are now rubble floating down rivers with nothing there anymore. This is in some of the most difficult terrain to rebuild in that you could have. People who know what they are talking about are saying we are short highways through the winter.
Here's some chopper footage: https://twitter.com/RobinMonks/status/1460690606410194949
City folks who think this was just some rain are nothing but evidence of how disconnected city people can become from the infrastructure on which they depend.
This is a really funny angle. I would think the city people are keen on how internationally connected they are as a coastal port city. Vancouver also has international access to the US. Vancouver can get goods from Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, San Diego, Alaska, Mexico, China, etc. Highways to the East and North being out won’t change this whatsoever.
Isn’t it the rural folks who live inland who are dependent on port cities and road infrastructure that goes over the passes going to be the most screwed? Which crops/goods are being shipped from central Canada to Vancouver during the winter months?
As to your assertion that highway closures won't change other access, this is nonsense. Take away the highways and you suddenly have WAY more that needs to get in and out the other ways, so the ferries and shipping traffic gets blocked up. I don't understand how anyone can believe "we'll just go the other way" is going to work fine. We don't have extra shipping works, boats, port slots, etc just waiting for twice the load or anything.
This is _already_ the direction these goods are coming in from. These so called idiotic city folk are likely going to be just fine. They might not be able to go to Whistler or whatever to go snowboarding for a year,
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bc-floods-rail-impact-1.625...
A large part of Vancouver's food comes from the Fraser Valley by truck -- through two municipalities that are now under water. The mayor of one of whom is already wondering whether farmers will be killing all their livestock.
It's a fuck of a lot worse than a cancelled snowboarding trip.
http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/Pla...
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWWz8QCP4Mm/?utm_medium=copy_lin...