Cheers on your other posts though!

The credit crunch and market malaise around the Olympic Village may have about the same probability and we have to hope (and pray) that senior officials and elected representatives have a better grasp of disaster and scenario planning around the Olympic event than they do with rare but predictable heavy snow events.

My point about earthquakes is simply, if the city can’t even deal with a snowfall – a fairly significant snowfall, but it’s just snow after all – how on earth will they deal with an earthquake?

What if it happens over the Xmas period when their employees are off? Do their plans include waiting for 2 weeks to get out the earth-moving equipment and do a bit of search and rescue?

I’m being facetious, but that’s the point of disaster preparedness. It doesn’t mean spending a fortune on snow ploughs we never use. It means having plans to mobilize appropriate resources (people and technology) in appropriate timeframes when something out of the ordinary happens.

Take the bs about having to put up signs to notify people about snow ploughs coming down the street. In the current circumstances, all they would have to do is circulate a press release to all the local media (they know how to do that, I would hope) saying something like “over the next few days a plough might come down your street. Move your car or will be buried”.

Not having an idea of how you’ll handle an emergency leads to crap like “it’ll cost $300k to put up signs to tell people to move their car to the other side of the street”.

It was interesting that you used the analogy of disaster/earthquake response. Our governments make it very clear we’re all on our own for 36 Hours(!!) after an earthquake.

Having lived through natural disasters and survived 3 months without power, I see these things as inevitable and I’d never bet my life on government alone. I’m still uncomfortable with the notion, which most take for granted in Vancouver, that every necessity of my life depends on an uninterrupted supply of electricity.

I could be pissed, having spent 2 hours digging out my car this afternoon (and let me state for the record that chivalry is NOT dead in Vancouver – half the block came to my rescue!)

And I do think the city engineering people have some explaining to do to. But really, let’s keep it in perspective: inconvenient, yes, but being unable to drive one’s car is not a crisis in a city with public transportation – hundreds of thousands of people do it every day.

Stuff happens. We need to accept some responsibility to look out for our own families and neighbours, unless we want to pay a fortune in taxes in the hope we’ll be protected from craddle to grave (and it won’t work anyway; the unforeseen will always come along.)

(And if we’re going to spend a fortune on disaster prep, I propose we start by seismically upgrading our schools – the most dangerous structures in our city, along with those old Gastown buildings – so we’ll at least have some kids left when we bully government into fixing our houses because we didn’t bother taking out earthquake insurance.)

How many people here have winter tires? Had this been foreseeable, we’d all have them. But I made the same calculation as the engineers and figured the cost wasn’t worth it, given the chances of this event & the options of taking transit instead or just staying put.

Not to be a stick in the mud on something that is off-topic, but the claim “600 climate scientists questioned global warming at a conference in Poland” is false.

And this city is not unilingual English, they have to put
out news in at least a half-dozen languages as few read or
watch the English media. 5 Sun/Provinces delivered in the
mornings to 50 homes I can see with early morning coffee.

Are we going to put up the red-clear-the-street lights as
in Quebec city for mass ploughing, and carrying away to
the melting bin, of street snow after a blizzard?
Light snow gets left behind and it usually too cold and thus
extremely dry to snow anymore.

And all our local walks are cleared in a variety of patterns
by this morning: whole sidewalk, central path, one half of
walk that is not hardpacked by foot traffic etc. We tend
to copy others. One person who washes his van daily,
also clears the snow 4 times a day. Obsessive.
Not often is salt used though. So much for the school kids
who painted fish by all the storm drains as an admonition
not to put noxious chemicals down the storm drain.
_________________________________________________________________
I tend to find more bumps and small potholes this time_________
and will this be a mad rush of ‘patching’ in February?__________

Wonder how many ploughs sat parked because staff were away on holidays and there was nobody to operate them.