For just a bit of context/anecdata, I'm talking to my brother who lives in Vancouver and he wasn't even aware this was a problem. The road closure[0] on hwy 1 near Abbotsford/Chilliwack is a good one hour drive away from Vancouver core[1]. So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way.
He also mentioned the weather cleared since yesterday, so floods should start to subside. You can follow the updates here[2]
I live in Vancouver - my coworkers and family were very aware of this, watching footage online and exclaiming at the brutal nature of the weather and landslides we experienced yesterday. Never seen this many roads closed in BC in my nearly 4 decades living here.
The whole upper pacific coastline is experiencing it. There is a lot of flooding along the Oregon coast as well with cars/trailers floating away and evacuations. Intense rains for days at a time. I mean we get a lot of rain here, but this has been pretty crazy and constant.
Let's hope it migrates further south and relieves some of the California drought. Any meteorologists have a sense of the weather patterns at play here?
Oh, the atmospheric river did hit California, and pretty hard in some places. Last month was the wettest October on record here in San Francisco. The area around Dixie (where there was a big fire earlier this year) saw landslides.
According to a podcast I listened to, this pattern might actually be bad because alternating cycles of extreme rain and extreme dryness means more vegetation growth during the wet months which in turn means more fuel to burn during the dry months.
The loss of established growth hurts in the rainy season too as landslides worsen. In our local San Bernardino mountains here burn patches quickly turn to land or mudslides.
That's not saying much anymore - the systems getting more and more unpredictable. The last La Nina was also supposed to worsen the ongoing drought but ended up dumping so much water that the state of emergency (or whatever its called) was withdrawn that March. IIRC it did dry out the San Diego area a bit, where the drought wasn't as bad.
Torrential rain can replace water in underground aquifers. But there is only so much water that can be absorbed by the ground, much of it just rushes out to sea.
Yes it's my car that I drive like 2000 miles a year, and not coal plants in third world countries, hexafluorine or whatever magical greenhouse gas we develop and use for 25 years before realizing our children will suffer.
No, it's my relatively new and aggressively emission controlled cars.
Interesting impression you have there - third world countries have actually contributed very little greenhouse gas historically and in the present-day age too.
The vast majority of this problem lies on the United States’ shoulders. We’ve contributed an outsize share to global warming. Your standard of life requires having benefited from creating global warming. Blaming developing countries for their current emissions is cowardly.
Transportation accounts for 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions [1] and that includes rail/air/marine travel so it doesn't seem to be as simple as getting people out of their cars.
Probably a better metric for us average people is to ask what produces most of our personal emissions. Yes, won’t correct the problem. But will give people a sense of agency instead of yet another way to feel helpless. It’s going to take an “all of the above, all hands on deck” response.
But you have to focus your efforts to get the biggest results. In this case I suspect only government can solve the problem (because someone’s going to have to change or end entire industries). So the best use of our energy might trying to be get an effective government in place.
I think about this a lot, and it seems to me that the amount effort it would take to get an effective government in place is roughly equal to the amount of effort it would take for people to make individual changes to their habits and consumption (which in turn, presumably, would cause industry and governments to change). In fact, they seem like essentially the same thing in that they both require the same kind of individual effort and engagement.
Right now, all most people do is vote (if they even bother) or maybe make donations, which really doesn't seem to be enough. Voting is important, but it doesn't have much impact if the same kinds of candidates keep getting elected, which is largely due to dysfunction in the electoral system, at least in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere, but I don't know enough about other countries to say).
Similarly, all most people do is recycle, which definitely isn't enough, given a lot (most?) of what gets put in the recycling bin doesn't get recycled, due in part to both lack of financial incentive as well as contamination from non-recyclables (confusing rules and general lack of care apparently).
I would like to think we could vote in a government that's focused on progress rather than partisan power struggles, but I don't think that's likely to happen any time soon, if ever. It would require a level of engagement that I just don't see happening.
I'd also like to think that we could change our habits on a mass scale and demand change through social and market forces, but in a similar way, I don't see that happening either. Their are just too many economic and cultural forces acting against progress.
> A similar example exists in the Fraser Canyon in British Columbia, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific each own a single track line - often on either side of the river. The companies have a joint arrangement where they share resources and operate the canyon as a double track line between meeting points near Mission and Ashcroft.[22]
I'm guessing its your point, but to spell it out, canada has oligopolies or monopolies, it doesnt have competitors at least in telecom and banking. From what I understand (like the recent Kansas? railway acquisition) CN and CP may actually be more in competition than some other industries. There is some complexity because part of the tradeoff for being granted oligo/monopoly status is the requirement to allow others on their network (e.g. for telco so maybe also for rail - I know they have to let Via, even if it's on a low priority basis). But overall, the business environment in canada is much closer to some kind of aristocracy or feudal system than an actual competitive landscape. Maybe that's true everywhere and just not as easy to see.
> it doesnt have competitors at least in telecom and banking
To be fair, the high regulation that we have in the banking sector insulated us from a lot of the 2008 financial crisis. So it's not all bad.
The big banks spent the early part of the 2000s complaining loudly about being "left out" of the financial boom happening and wanted to internationalize and merge with US banks, and our government said no. America's regular cycle of financial crises and ruin kind of proves that unrestricted competition should not always be the unconditional goal of a given industry.
In terms of rail (and other infrastructure), keep in mind that our country is bigger than the US and we have 10% of the population. A lot of our monopolies/crown-corps exist because if it wasn't for government subsidies/handouts, none would exist at all.
So it's not always a reasonable argument to say there "should" be competition, when it doesn't make financial sense for new entrants to compete. No one would ever fund the startup costs, because it would take decades to make the money back, if you ever did.
That said, our telco sector does absolutely need a shakeup and competition (better rules for CLECs to use ILEC infrastructure etc).
Thank you for eloquently describing why Canada has chosen a different path than the USA. Banking, for example, is such a clear-cut case of competition not being detrimental for Canadians. For example, I've seen Americans laugh at Canadians on Reddit for not having the Cash app when our equivalent service is available directly from our banks (with a shitty UI, sure) and free. I pay my plumber with e-transfer and couldn't be happier.
Canadian banks are the most profitable in the western world, because we pay the highest fees in the western world.
A lot of it is hidden - Canadian banks charge outrageous sums of money for foreign exchange fees. Credit card interchange fees are reliably a full 1% higher than in the US. e-Transfers are intentionally limited in size so that banks can still make their money on credit card payments etc.
Interac is a bank-owned monopoly, and merchants eat astronomical fees even though it's nominally "free" to send an email money transfer to your plumber.
The more you dig into the Canadian banking ecosystem, the more you realize how powerful it is and how much rent-seeking is really going on.
The amazing part is that they've convinced the average Canadian that this oligopoly is actually good for them. Marketing works!
Anyone working in the financial services space, however, understands that the reality is really much darker than people realize.
What is also true is that Canada has never had anything like the S&L scandal in the 90s or the 2008 US financial crisis where massive swaths of the working class lost much of their savings.
So sure, we have higher fees due to regulatory capture, but I'll take that trade to know that some unregulated finance bros aren't fucking around with my life savings.
Not just higher fees. Our GDP/capita relative to the US has been in steep decline. Cost of living is also higher across the board on everything from food to electronics, above and beyond what straight foreign exchange would suggest.
Gas is more expensive too. Oh, and wages are stagnant (except for in tech), which is a real problem when inflation hits 5% (as it is now). Productivity growth has been basically non-existent for decades.
Can I connect all of this to the banking oligopoly? No, but it's symptomatic of the larger problem: that Canada is a very difficult country to do business in. Ham-handed government regulation in every part of the economy is a huge drag on economic growth.
There are a lot of free options: even more if you consider ones that require a minimum balance. The paid ones though are typically $10-15.
Where they really get you though is in service fees. If you overdraft or do any one of a myriad of options you can get hit with penalty fees. Basically you just have to treat the minimum balance as a hard zero.
Until you use your credit card. Interchange fees in Canada are a full 1% higher than in the US, on average. You pay for this in higher prices on goods and services.
Or until you buy something in USD. Foreign exchange fees in Canada are a multiple of what they are south of the border, and Canadian banks ruthlessly protect this business by refusing to bank money service businesses that compete with them.
Canadian banks are the most profitable in the world, and they're really good at making customers think they're not paying that much for the pleasure of feeding the oligopoly.
Yes, that is probably true: I have kept a minimum balance ever since opening the bank account so I am not really familiar with how it all works. I have heard the horror stories though about how the bank will order the transactions to incur the maximum fees (at $20 or more per transaction) if you miscalculate the balance when the bank account is close to empty.
Some sectors tend to get regulated as utilities rather than businesses, because they tend not to lend themselves to competition.
Railways are a classic example; two railways rarely directly compete with each other (since even if they connect the two same points they probably do so via wildly different routes) and some level of coordination is needed to avoid scheduling conflicts on competing trains.
Except Point Roberts (not Port) is just a residential area that isn't self sufficient in any way, and doesn't have thousands of containers arriving for shipping inland
Sigh, brain lag. At least the wiki link I pasted was correct.
Nothing to add to your point about self-sufficiency, my intent was to draw parallels to the comment I was responding to. ("It's [Vancouver] essentially a peninsula, it still has road and rail links to Washington State." <=> "It's [Point Roberts] a peninsula, it still has road links to British Columbia.").
The big issue is that half of Abbotsford may well turn into a lake, and Chilliwack will become completely cut off from the world (because of damage to the highways further east, and the flooding in Abbotsford.)
And unlike Vancouver, it can't just get food and animal feed brought in by ship/from the Peace Arch border crossing.
There was a case study I read in some supply chain courses a while back that was about supply disruptions in supermarkets due to a temporary but unforseen border closure somewhere in Central Europe. I don't remember exact numbers, but the relationship between the number of missed supply trucks and products out of stock was roughly exponential. After a single truck, there were like a dozen products out of stock. But after a second truck, there were over 400 products out of stock. By the fifth missed truck, 20% of the entire store was out of stock.
Since most stores have distribution centers that can break up replenishment into small increments, grocery stores typically use a method of inventory management that "tops up" inventory levels on a scheduled basis. High demand items might get replenished once a day or more, while some might get replenished on 2, 3, 4 day intervals all the way up to monthly intervals for low demand durable items. Replenishment schedules are staggered on a per-SKU basis, so that the number of trucks per day is roughly constant.
The short story is that delayed trucks might be a tiny annoyance, but a full supply disruption can cause utter chaos in less than a week. If reroutes through the US aren't facilitated, you can expect to see all of the most commonly purchased items in your grocery store out of stock far sooner than you expect.
Almost everyone in Vancouver, Vancouver Island, all over BC really, has flooded basements and other stuff to deal with. My school closed down due to power outages, for example. The road to the local landfill has washed out. Half of my classmates were without power last night, and one of them is on the wrong side of a mountain pass and will miss class today. Our teacher has decided not to bother trying to get to campus and we're back to Zoom school.
Itt: People telling about how the flooding has directly and severely impacted their lives, and commenters who got lucky explaining how it's actually not a big deal.
I mean I live in the lower mainland and I know exactly 0 people who have personally experienced any damage or loss. Given that I have friends all over the Lower Mainland and Interior BC and family up and down Vancouver Island it’s a decent sample size.
I have empathy for those who are going through hell right now but I’m just pointing out that your assessment of “nearly everyone” is way off base.
Meanwhile I’ve got relatives evacuated from Merritt, classmates who won’t be able to attend class for a week, and almost everyone I know lost power over the weekend. Facebook is full of people asking for fans and pumps to dry out their basements (including people I know personally). You say look at the bigger picture but you’re counting your personal experience as the best indicator of it. I’d suggest the news is showing the bigger picture.
Yes some areas are devastated and cut off and have a long, hard road ahead but that still doesn’t mean “nearly everyone” in the province had issues. Again; vast majority of people were fine; some areas were hit incredibly hard and other areas had minor issues but the majority watched it come and go with zero consequences.
The news is a bad example because they are clearly going to focus on the places that were hit the hardest. It’s not a very good story to say “everything in X area is absolutely fine”.
I spent an hour and a half today tracking down and explaining how to use sump and transfer pumps to a friend of mine near Mt Vernon, WA. I've lived in a place that floods for almost 9 years so I take for granted that people know how siphons and various pumps work.
There was only two pumps available in all of whatcom county, from what I saw. Even the harbor fright was out of everything.
Btw if you don't have a pit to put a sump pump in, you want a transfer pump that self primes. The prices are insane right now, but generally $60-100 for 300GPH 100VAC. If you're willing to be careful and mitigate damage to dirt from water, you can dig a hole for a 5 gallon bucket and drop a sump pump in it. You might have a wee bit of standing water under your house but it's better than 3" of water.
My house is 6' above grade, and 3' above the pad, so I don't worry much, once when it rained 28" in three days there was 3" of water on the road out front but I didn't need to go anywhere. A couple days later I did a drive about and so many people had their homes flooded near the farmlands.
Stay safe and pay attention to your local authorities about closures and warnings, and don't cross water on the road, especially if you've never seen the road dry. A large flooding can wash away the road, too, so just stay off the roads if you can!
I’m a Vancouverite, and this is a pretty narrow, short sighted view. Sure, some people aren’t very impacted, but a tonne of people are. Lots of people who need to travel around the province but can’t, who were travelling and can’t return home, who can’t ship things in or out, whose basements are flooded, etc.
For just one story, my wife’s boss was travelling in the interior (drove there). Doesn’t have his passport because he wasn’t planning to leave the country. Is now stranded, trying to decide whether to abandon his car and fly home, so he can get back to the small business he runs, or try to wait it out so he can drive home in god knows how long. Tonnes of people facing impacts like this, or much worse.
They might be able to get the car shipped (train or transfer service), even if that takes a while.
If the closure is longer than X (based on work, hotel, etc) then it might be cheaper to fly and also have the car shipped; or even sold if they have extras.
Yeah, I’m sure they’ll figure it out - it’s a tricky situation, but not an impossible one. Many, many people are in far worse situations with this flooding, e.g. having their homes or businesses flooded.
Just wanted to share a personal example of why I strongly disagreed with this comment:
> So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way.
I'm surprised there's no shortages yet because trucks can't get to the city. Or does Vancouver import most non-regional goods from the US (and not the rest of Canada) anyway?
Keep in mind that Vancouver is a port city, and the road closures did not affect roads to the US so for the vast majority of the people in the city, the impact is likely minimum. I'd be more worried about disruptions for municipalities like Hope, which are only connected to Vancouver by a handful of roads (the next major hub in the other direction would be Calgary, which is... well, pretty far away).
The storm that hit which caused the flooding which closed the roads also hit the Vancouver-adjacent parts of the US, so some of those are closed as well.
Gas comes through pipeline from refineries in Washington, so that should be largely unaffected.
Lots of produce does come from the Fraser Valley which is impacted, but also North/South links to the USA (ie. we get heaps of produce from California).
I assume there's a fair amount of food that is delivered from the port, as a lot of food packaging warehouses are near the port.
Most trade in Canada is North/South aligned. Tbh the east/west orientation of the country doesn't make a lotta sense lol.
No it doesn't. Vast majority of the gas is through Trans Mountain from Alberta. Also, more than half of the oil that gets refined in Washington comes from an arm of the Trans-mountain pipeline, so also Alberta. 100% of the fuel used at the Vancouver airport also comes through trans-mountain.
Are the prices in line with what those products would cost in the US (e.g. WA state)? I was under the impression that the prices in BC were lower, so now I'm wondering if the price adjustment to account for local markets is significant or not, or if I misremembered completely.
I feel like the in season (from Fraser Valley) vs not in season (california or mexico) produce price is only like maybe a +$1-2 price modifier on things?
I don't look too closely at my grocery bill, so I'm probably not the most helpful person to ask.
I assume all the food is cheaper in the USA than Canada.
My impression are the prices are pretty similar with exception to dairy, where Canada has more stringent regulations and therefore prices are slightly higher.
Last time I was in New York was a good few years ago, but I was very surprised how much more expensive supermarket food was than in the UK, like 3x more. In a huge country with lots of farmland like the US with less stringent food regulations in theory food should be cheaper so I’m curious as to what causes this price difference.
New York as in New York City? Everything needs to be trucked in and out and there are toll bridges everywhere. Go to the suburbs and food is cheaper. Go further and it’s way cheaper.
New York is a crazy expensive city and most of the stuff people want to eat comes California or Latin America. It's quite a bit further to travel compared to i.e. importing from North Africa or Europe.
There don’t seem to be shortages in Vancouver or surrounding areas from what I’m hearing. However, I’m in Chilliwack house sitting while my family is away. There absolutely are shortages here.
Three gas stations are out of gas (this was before noon) people are driving down with jerry cans to fill up extra fuel, stores are all bare because people ran to the stores to stock up on food, there was a line to get in the grocery stores. While inside some people were pushing two carts full of groceries to the checkout.
The roads going West are flooded out and the roads to the East are flooded out. There is definitely shortages here because Vancouver has the regional warehouses. There is no resupplies that can come into Chilliwack, and there hasn’t been an announcement on when the roads will clear.
Some areas are told to shelter in place and others are told to evacuate.
The BC Milk Marketing Board has told many of its producers to begin destroying their output until further notice since there is no means of transporting it:
The shortage is the other way. The rest of BC gets most of its produce from the lower mainland. I live in Kelowna (funny to see a local news site on here), and our stores have basically no produce because we can’t get anything from the lower mainland. Fun times.
Conversely, the outward flow of Okanagan wine products will be sharply affected. For example, the market for Okanagan ice wine in Asia is huge. Also, when the Lower Mainland growing season is done, the produce shipped from Chile and Peru comes into Vancouver's ports and goes out across western Canada and the North.
the Trans Canada Highway in some parts is an undivided 2-lane road, so it wouldn't be surprising for freight to choose to take something like I-90 instead, though you would have to go through border checks.
Anything going to southern Ontario or Quebec would already be going through the US if it could because it’s faster, better weather and cheaper gas. The only stuff that wasn’t was stuff that couldn’t (can’t/won’t do the paperwork). Customs bonding and inspections can be a real pain.
Canada Post is going to be a real mess though. They either fly or truck overland domestically.
The Trans Canada Highway from Kamloops to Hope was largely superceded as a trucking route by the more capacious and direct Coquihalla Highway after 1986. Now the Coquihalla is in dire condition.
The Coquihalla is one of the more dangerous highways you will ever drive, particularly in winter, mainly due to altitude and bad weather. Not fun in a white out.
BC Ferries has a multitude of travel advisories in effect due to the high seas and winds, so reliability is a concern. Vancouver has 2 ferry terminals, and both are subject to the conditions.
Son has a hockey tournament next week in Vernon, BC. Due to road closure, Google Maps is sending me to Washington State and back into Canada. Absolutely wild.
If you live in Vancouver and are staying there it is not an issue.
But there is an amazing huge scale issue of access to the interior of British Columbia.
2 out of 3 highways from Alberta are closed. That means you have to drive either an ~ extra 500 miles north, or south, to travel 50-100 miles west or east.
There is no way to travel across a whole region of a huge country.
Similar to closing all east west highways in southern California, from the Mexico border to lake Tahoe.
Sure , you can drive down to Mexico, across to Tijuana, and back up.
I live in Vancouver. It absolutely is an issue. It’s a huge issue. We are the primary port for western Canada. All shipments that would have been routed via road and rail travel through Vancouver now need to be rerouted either via air or through the USA. Gas shipments are going to be complicated. Food shipments are going to be complicated.
These highways that are closed due to collapse are built into the side of mountains and require significant engineering testing in order to be deemed safe to rebuild on, not taking into account the amount of engineering that’s required to actually safely and sustainably rebuild them. Suburbs of Vancouver (Abbotsford) are essentially underwater.
It is patently false to say this isn’t an issue for people who are living and staying in Vancouver. Hell, even major highways within Vancouver have been shut down. These are much more temporary shutdowns than the primary highways out of town, but still require respecting in order to repair and restore which limits travel.
I didnt mean to belittle your issues. I was trying to respond to op, that this affects the whole province, and is actually serious.
I think it will become moreso as we move along. As you say, there is some serious engineering ahead.
We were wondering how long to fix rail road? If a hundred years ago, it seems as if we could act faster. During WW II also. We shall see fast 'they' fix this.
and for that matter, the whole country.
If rail down, no Chinese imports, no metallurgical coal or grain exports.
Highway 16 and the 43 (2 on the BC side) are still open. They're probably referring to the 16 because the 43 is pretty out of the way. The 1 and 3 is still open on the AB side too, though avalanches were/are causing trouble in Rogers Pass in central BC.
Anyone who was seriously motivated to get to the rest of Canada could drive through the US or take a ferry to Vancouver island, drive to Port Hardy, take a ferry to Bella Coola or Prince Rupert and drive to the rest of the country from there. It would take forever and the roads from Bella Coola and Prince Rupert are notorious. Vancouverites say the Coquihalla is the gnarliest road in Canada, and it just shows that they've never seen the rest of their country. The 2 lane, gravel, Heckman Pass on highway 20 is nothing like the paved, seperated 4-6 lanes of the Coq.
As an anecdote, I live significantly East of Vancouver, but most of our goods come from the port of Vancouver. Things are going to get really interesting, as these roads will take a while to be repaired.
I live in Vancouver and had no idea until a friend in another country saw the news and asked me about it. Not to say people elsewhere in BC weren’t impacted (one town had to evacuate) but the media is not painting an accurate picture.
Dire in what way? Vancouver still has the YVR airport, a seaport, ferries, a downtown float plane airport and both road and rail access to the US. There will be some impact to prices, I imagine, while the road and rail links to the rest of Canada are rebuilt.
Dire for Merritt (evacuated), Princeton (under water), Hope (all highways closed or curtailed), Abbotsford (under water), Chilliwack (under water), Fernie (no highway access) and a host of other places on the mainland and on the Island that are vital transport, agricultural, forestry, tourism, and mining centres. You mentioned prices, so scale it up to international economics level.
I think a reasonable variation on that strategy is for a bunch of people to "move out to the country" all at once, and in roughly the same place. I.e. bootstrap a new city. It'd take a high level of coordination to pull it off successfully though. Ideally they would move somewhere not in a flood plain and not subject to a substantially higher risk of natural disasters (or the not-entirely-natural disasters brought on by climate change). Part of the reason we have a shortage of housing in cities that people want to live in is that we have a shortage of cities that people want to live in.
Otherwise, just moving to the country just means you're dependent on infrastructure in different ways. You might be able to grow your own food if you had to, which is an option city people don't really have. That's worth something.
I'm totally unfamiliar with the geography there; are peripheral cities and towns around Vancouver as unaffected as Vancouver itself? I can imagine it happening in some places I've lived, where the central city is humming along just fine and everyone inside the city is blind to the 50% of the population around the city that just got stranded and cut off from supplies.
Depends what you consider peripheral. The places within a couple hours big enough to notice as you drive through are basically Lions Bay/Squamish going north, Maple Ridge/Mission on the 7, and Abbotsford/Chillwack/Hope on highway 1 out the Valley.
Chilliwack and Hope might be cut off, though I think it's possible to get there via minor roads/unusual routes. Abbotsford is partly flooded, but areas that aren't should be accessible. Lions Bay/Squamish and Maple Ridge/Mission are fine, as far as I know.
So if a 1-2 hour drive is the limit, then parts of Abbotsford/Chilliwack/Hope are pretty miserable right now, but it should be fairly localised.
On the other hand, you can argue that most of Southern BC is "peripheral" to Vancouver, despite parts being 4-5 or more hours away. Those parts will have more issues, since you start getting into places where the only connections are (were) the highways that flooded and washed out.
More or less. Greater Vancouver suburbs largely unaffected. Farther out peripherals (Abbotsford, Hope) badly flooded. All regional towns and cities beyond those cut off.
"In the wake of the extreme weather events that continue to devastate First Nations across BC, the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) calls on the Provincial government to declare an indefinite State of Emergency in BC, effective immediately."
The picture painted by the media is a pretty accurate representation of reality. This recent spat of weather has been pretty horrifying for a lot of people in the valley. Mudslides, power outages, flooding. My parents have been dealing with it for the past few days in their homestead out by Chilliwack, and it's not been great.
I understand that someone WFH in their swanky Kits apartments isn't particularly impacted by any of this, but there does exist a BC outside of Vancouver.
The parent comment to mine specifically mentioned media coverage. So, bearing in mind that there are states of emergency declared throughout the Province Of British Columbia as a direct consequence of this atmospheric event, there is plenty of objective primary source material available to anyone from those authorities should a person decline to believe media reportage.
This is complete bullshit. EVERYONE is affected. Honestly, just read the BC news. If they think they aren't affected, then they don't understand BC supply chains and haven't noticed... yet.
"The rail lines in question are the main arteries in and out of the port. "The mere fact that those trains are stalled means that it's going to back up further because those ships are still underway," Prentice said.
Adel Guitouni, a business professor at the University of Victoria, says the pandemic followed by recent natural disasters have underscored just how fragile global supply chains are.
"It would have a huge impact, and it would be felt not just in B.C. but across the country," he said in an interview. "You start having shortages in places and a lot of accumulation in other places."
Depending on the extent of the damage, he thinks the rail companies will likely have most of their lines back up and running within a week or so, but clearing the global backlog in supply chains will take much longer.
"This will take until probably 2023 to see some kind of getting back to normal," he said"
I guess they haven't read yet on how damaged the supply chain is going to be then. This is not "we'll fix it up in a few weeks" road damage, it's more like major shipping roads in BC are going to be affected for through the worst of the winter here.
To be fair, I just found out about this literally from the link at the top of this page, a couple of hours ago. Not exactly enough time to become an expert in supply chain logistics in a province I don't even live in.
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.
Look, it's not "roads blocked". We're not talking "move the dirt and it'll be ok". The roads are GONE.
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.
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.
> 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?
Well, we have tons of folks in Van, where it basically snows a few times a year, who have never driven the roads through the rest of the province and have no clue how bad they can get in bad weather. And I'm sure every modern city has people who have never thought about how things get in their stores.
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.
> 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,
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.
City folk in Vancouver proper are not going to be majorly affected, jobs related to the ports may have less hours but the supply chains typically starts, not terminate here. I feel for the valley and interior thou. Those areas are most definitely going to feel this for a while.
How you managed to convert devastating footage of washed away bridges and roads into an attack on unionisation is something future historians are going to have to work very hard to explain.
That's one section of like ten equally important road links that are in equally bad shape. That one could be fixed fast, sure, if it was the ONLY problem we were dealing with right now.
There's still a road to the left so that section is passsable almost immediately. They deal with mudslides and washouts fairly quickly most years. I realize though that some of these are more extensive than the past.
If you mean for just today for someone in a less-impacted area of the Lower Mainland, that's an acceptable if minimalist answer, but saying "most people" is very problematic in the light of a huge amount of evidence from primary sources.
"So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way."
Where do truck shipments come into Vancouver from ?
sure, they just have to hope the north cascades highway is open when the snow-levels are already lowering from these storms. Usually that highway is closed during the winter season
I wouldn't worry about shipments into town. Suez was out for like a week and the world managed more or less just fine. LA port is backlogged to the wazoo but nobody is starving because of it. My understanding is that the Vancouver situation is only 1-2 days old so far, so there's probably not that much reason for alarm unless damage to every single artery turn out to be serious. Worst comes to worst, the US road is still open.
"The boonies", does that include Calgary? There is quite a bit of road traffic between Vancouver and Calgary via Kamloops and Banff. Or did you mean just West of the Rockies?
Sorry, "boonies" might have been a bit of a callous choice of words. Reading more about it, it sounds like the folks at Abbotsford, Hope and surrounding areas are having a pretty lousy time right now.
To me the 'boonies' in Canada is west of Timmins, East of Wawa and North of Desbarats in Ontario, and anything North of Kamloops in BC. The roads in BC are very critical infrastructure, there aren't that many of them to begin with and there are a lot of choke points on the downslopes of mountain ranges where you have to pass through, unfortunately it looks as though that's where the road outages are.
Canada is an amazing country scenery wise, but it is also a very thin veneer of civilization on top of a very rugged countryside and it doesn't take much to turn it from workable into unconnected islands overnight. Let's hope that they manage to keep the power running and some way to keep those communities supplied because with winter on the way that can get ugly really quickly.
Canadians are usually pretty self sufficient but without roads I'm not sure how that would work.
When I was young and poor and crazy, I did the Greyhound trip to/from the GTA to the prairies a couple times and that is just the most insane stretch of highway ever, so mind boggling how long it takes.
Lakes and rocks and lakes and rocks and lakes and rocks and trees and rocks and lakes...
Sleeping pills, muscle relaxants, reading the entire Dune series from beginning to end, and waking up finding that you've fallen asleep and snuggled up to the nice old lady sitting next to you.
I think pbourke is talking about roads substantially North of that. There are bush roads going west from Timmins all the way to Wawa, there is absolutely nothing there but trees, and Greyhounds don't drive there, in fact the only thing you find there that drives is hunters and logging machinery.
Sudbury to Kenora is usually done by the Transcanada. But yes, I imagine the roads north from there are seriously no-mans land.
I grew up driving around the forestry roads and cutlines of the foothills in Alberta with my canoeing parents, but that is far less isolated than northern Ontario. I always find it surprising.
I'd like to live up there somewhere, but my wife isn't game to the idea.
I've been to Vancouver before, but I"m completely ignorant about the supply chain there.
We're talking about a metropolis of 2.5 million people. What's the impact on food supplies, fuel, etc? Very curious. Is it primarily coming up from the US???
There are two areas under discussion here. Vancouver, which goes by a bunch of different names including Metro Vancouver Regional District, is the 2.5 mil that you’re talking about. The second piece is the Fraser Valley Regional District, this is everything else east of Vancouver up to and including Hope. This is another 600k people.
FVRD is where the impacts are so far.
I mentioned in another comment that I’m in Chilliwack and gas stations are empty and grocery stores are also empty. Hoarding happened really fast today. The roads for resupply are shut down.
As far as I know, the main hubs are in MVRD, but probably not City of Vancouver proper. Nothing can get passed Abbotsford going East. There are roads past Hope that have also been destroyed (collapsed bridges and two lane roads completely gone). There might be ways to go north and around, but where I am it’s isolated on both sides.
I am visiting this area and am stuck until things are sorted out.
Previous estimates have said there could be 20-30 billion dollars in economic impact if there is a severe flood in the region.
To clarify on that last point - there is a single pumping station that is working to keep the Fraser river from turning half of the city of Abbotsford into a lake.
That station is under threat of failure, due to rising floodwaters.
If it fails, that's it. Half the town will be under ten feet of water, that has nowhere to drain. I don't mean 'nowhere to drain until next week' - I mean 'nowhere to drain, period.'
Because the Sumas Prairie, the location with the imminent threat of flooding, was originally a lake. It was drained in the 1920s to claim farm land for the Fraser Valley. This is reversion to the natural state.
Doesn't this affect deliveries of needed supplies to the city? I guess the port and railways are not impacted, but I would think roads carry some significant cargo.
Some (not sure if all) railway tracks were also affected [0]. There are two tracks that go into Vancouver (CN and CP have each their own I believe), not sure if both were affected. Keep in mind that the train also works as a pipeline of sorts for the Alberta oil, and a ton of coal comes from the eastern BC border by train. And on that note, I heard speculation that the actual pipelines may have also been affected.
- If it is possible to come and go via the US, I wonder if a special allowance will be made for that
- I vaguely remember some major city in Alaska was said to have no road to the outside world? Google Maps shows a route from Anchorage to Juneau, but it goes through Canada.
Most of the population of Canada is within miles of the US border. For any given city, connection to the US is probably much more important than connections to other parts of Canada.
You could just as easily infer from this anecdata that people that live in cities tend to be very insulated from the infrastructure and larger support systems required to maintain their way of life...
...but Everything is Fine is an equally strong conclusion.
I love them because their reporting is terrible and the site itself is straight out of the 90's. They used to run polls that were easy to manipulate, according to a ex-coworker of mine. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Nonetheless, everybody in Kelowna acts like Castanet is the one true source of information...
Castanet is gloriously imperfect. I hope they never change and never fade away.
It's exactly what it looks like: a hodge-podged effort by some local folks with little experience and ability among them, besides an earnest desire to report local news with a local perspective, that has stood the test of time (it launched in 2000!).
Because there is literally at least one super distracting animated GIF ad in view 100% of the time while I scroll that page (which, on my iPhone, is not exactly easily readable due to lack of responsiveness).
On the OP article I see zero ads but I think that’s possibly my PiHole kicking in (which notable fails to block any of the presumably locally hosted adds on Castanet).
I agree with some of your other points but let’s not go to far :)
The key with 90s web design is the relative absence of Javascript. There's virtually no asynchronous requests; and Castanet works fine with NoScript, most modern sites do not.
I understand where you're coming from, but I came from 90s webdev. The gift of aysnc requests was the one true credit I give MS for their contribution to moving the web forward (even if it might have been self-serving). The fact that we no longer had to do full screen refreshes to update one part of the page was glorious. It helped allow the deprecation of frames.
However, just like all good things, people decided if a little is good more would be better. This is why we can't have nice things, but it doesn't mean that the thing itself isn't nice.
This goes back to the distinction between web pages/documents (deliver immutable server-side content once, up front) and web apps (lots of back and forth with mutable data on the server). A news website should never be anything except pages, even with interactive content, but it seems almost nobody can resist the urge to treat everything like an app.
Not every website is a news site, nor is every non-newsite an app. Having a website that functions as a store front and information page so that 90% of the site is static, yet dynamically being able to add things to a cart is an example. Is that an app? But not having to do a full page refresh on a POST to add an item to a cart is glorius.
Just because the webiste in question of this thread is a newsite doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater because it fits this one category.
Not only that, I didn't even have to touch NoScript - it all apparently loaded perfectly. Wow, it'd be nice if much more of the internet was like this!
Is it just me or was Castanet some sort of Internet things besides Vancouver news?
I remember digicrime.com making fun of it. And they had all these “services” where they exploited browser problems like endless popups etc — they specifically said they don’t do spam because they can just sign you up for tons of spam and let those marketers do the work haha
Anyone remember that? (“it is now unsafe to turn on your computer”)
Castanet’s true genius is that it was founded by a guy who owned a bunch of radio stations and thus still sells advertising that way. $xxxx/mo for a rotating 250x250
How many people will see it? Mmm about this many hands outstretched as big as a salmon
The thing prints money as local businesses funnel all their advertising budgets to it.
No expectation of performance, like buying a newspaper ad lol
I actually love this site. So refreshing. Feels like a homepage put together very manually by people that really care.
Love the "Around The Web" section and how it genuinely just wants you to see a video of a cat playing piano [0]. No aggressive ad placement or fake product review schemes. Just an awesome video of a cat they wanted to share.
Edit: And it seems polling system for "How does this story make you feel?" only relies on cookies to prevent duplicate votes... So I sent them 100 votes for "Awesome"
The terrible reporting assessment is very accurate. Castanet got lucky and capitalized on a strong desire for local content and also the fact that big players did traditionally ignore the Kelowna media market. Kelowna only really became a bigger city after the Coquihalla Highway was built in 86 to 88 (in stages and Kelowna was last link) and the attitude towards it from outside media took a long time to catch up.
As an American working in politics who's jacked into the daily Politico/WSJ/Twitter grind it warms my heart to briefly imagine that all Canadians get their news from quirky, local newspapers like this.
One of my family members has been stuck just east of Hope, British Columbia[1] for almost two days now. There is currently no cell service, but luckily they have a Garmin inReach so we can communicate via its SMS feature.
For anybody with friends/family in the area, the BC subreddit megathread[2] on this is a good starting place to get information on evacuations, power outage status, road closures, official relevant Twitter accounts, etc.
That garmin is a cool toy, but pricey ($400 for the device plus $50/mo for unlimited text service). What does your family member do that they have one? It seems like the kind of thing a park ranger would have, or that someone might rent before going on a long hike in a remote area.
I live in a very rural area of the US, so I probably have an over-representative sample, but mostly folks I know who own one (myself included) view it at as an essential piece of backcountry safety equipment. If you spend 1 or 2 weekends per month in areas without cell signal (even recreationally, as is my case), it quickly becomes worthwhile even just as a means of emergency communication for people to contact _you_, not to mention the ability to call for rescue if you're unfortunate enough to have an accident where you need to be medivac'd.
How many of those people have a PS5 ($400+, depending on edition), PS4 ($400 at launch) or some flavor of Xbox ($400 or so, depending on edition). I have friends who own multiple game consoles and don't consider it unrestrained opulence that owning a Garmin Inreach supposedly represents.
I heard that cell phone services near NYC were down during 9/11. If a similar event that disrupted regional cell phone towers were to happen again, a garmin inreach would allow me to stay connected right? Since it's not dependent on the infrastructure near the user (and this is assuming a regional event where cell phone services are not overloaded / down in a different country, so that you can reach the 2nd party)
Assuming such a network stays available for non-emergency use, maybe.
9/11 also ended up jamming 911 and emergency responders' networks (their radios were not designed to have thousands of firefighters and police officers and ambulances concentrated in one mass event) so if something were available I'd assume they would commandeer it.
Pricey, but priceless for someone who is spending even a moderate amount of time enjoying the backcountry. In context, a typical REI-equipped backpacker is spending $100+ on boots, $200+ on a tent, $200+ on a pack, $100+ per piece of high quality outerwear, not to mention hundreds or thousands more on skis/bikes/climbing gear if they do more than just hike/backpack. When you're laying out that amount of cash just to go out and do your favorite activity, it makes sense and is fairly common to spend an additional $400 for a convenient portable distress/backcountry connectivity plan.
What does your family member do that they have one?
Goes on a hike and realizes that a lot of BC doesn't have any cell service?
I haven't used mine for an actual emergency, but it did come in handy in Yukon with an irreparable motorcycle tire. I mostly use it as a backcountry text message device to let the spouse know I'm not dead, or just general chat if I have messages left. Regardless, "long hike in a remote area" defines even a lot of day hikes in WA state, let alone the interior of BC. There probably isn't a month that goes by that I don't grab mine for one remote adventure or another.
There are still some of us who have CB radios (with all their limitations acknowledged) in our vehicles for back country emergency use, and I occasionally see mobile ham radio operators. A Garmin inReach seems like it would be a good addition.
You'll need a special VHF radio for that kind of traffic tracking on Forest Service Roads in BC, and there are specific usage patterns you must follow:
Citizen-Band "CB" is a pretty specific type of AM radio limited to a number of defined channels around 27MHz.
Those Baofeng radios are VHF/UHF (140MHz/440MHz) FM radios, not "CB". If you had a Baofeng, and your buddy had a CB, there is no good way they would be able to communicate. These radios can operate in a wide range of frequencies with various levels of legality. But yeah in the US and Canada its generally legal to receive a transmission...other than maybe old cellular phones but that's another complicated mess.
I think so as well, but it looks like they had their terminology confused. They used the term CB originally, then talked about using a Baofeng. I'm just pointing out that CB is something very different from VHF FM. Many lay people see a radio with a handmike and think "CB".
That's an excellent point - using the channel maps at the site I linked to above, there is nothing to stop someone with a scanner keeping informed of FSR traffic.
Just one other point: on an FSR an average person's general sense of traffic "right of way" is generally wrong and can result in some terrible accidents far from help. To wit: the bus crash involving UBC students outside Bamfield.
Said family member mentioned in the parent thread keeps a handheld radio (I don't know the exact tech specs, sorry) for such occasions. That said, they mostly use it to just listen for any logging trucks calling out checkpoints so they can avoid getting in their way when travelling to their remote campsites.
Coupled with a Garmin inReach w/ backcountry maps installed, it gives us peace of mind in case something goes wrong out in the bush.
They frequently go camping with their family in the interior of BC so they always have one for emergencies. I agree they can be pricey, but it obviously paid for itself just in this situation alone :)
I know a decent number of folks in the Washington ski/climb/do-things-in-remote-areas scene who have em, though more common is the type that doesn't let you sms and doesn't have a monthly fee (basically a please help or I'm not getting home button). That said most of my friends with inreaches don't have the unlimited sms plan, and just budget the limited number for check-ins.
And yes, it's generally a good idea for anybody hiking in areas without cell phone reception - even if it's not particularly far out from populated areas! I live in North Bend, WA, and it feels like almost every year there's at least one hiker lost on one of the popular local trails. Sometimes they get lucky:
I mentally shudder every time I go hiking there, and see all the people dressed in cotton clothing and wearing street shoes (or even flip flops!) as they head towards the trail from the trailhead parking lot. Maybe there's something about well-maintained trails that promotes a false sense of security? Like, it looks neat and well-travelled, there's plenty of signage, so what could possibly go wrong? And it mostly doesn't - but when it does, it can get real bad real quick.
I don't have one personally but if I did more solo hiking in more remote areas, especially in the Western US I'd probably break down and get one. Cell service isn't dependable and I'd likely convince myself that it was cheap insurance in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, people managed for a very long time without having the ability to call for help or check in and they generally were OK with that. (And calling for help doesn't mean that Superman is going to swoop in and pick you up anyway.) But they're probably a reasonable safety aid if you're somewhere that doesn't have reliable cell service.
People also died in the back woods a lot more than they do now. There are tons of injuries that go from minor to fatal if you don’t have timely rescue. A rescue beacon or call doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, but it drastically changes the odds.
>People also died in the back woods a lot more than they do now.
That certainly could be true although I suspect a lot of people are also less prepared/careful today because they assume they can just call for help. And then they end up with a dead battery, no cell reception, or conditions are just such that rescue is delayed.
That said, a cell phone probably should be on your "10 things to carry" list these days. And I could certainly be convinced that an inReach-like things should be too if you're regularly off by yourself in areas without a lot of people.
Also, more people are in the back woods these days for recreational purposes rather than pure necessity, which also confounds the numbers. The relationship between safety gear and risk taking attitudes seems to be relatively complicated, and none of the sources I’ve read have managed to pin down whether or not safety equipment reliably produced more risk taking behavior.
Still, if I was in the habit of going further afield than your typical day hiker, or lived in a remote area, I think a rescue beacon would be a minimum requirement. An inReach gives you rescue functionality and GPS, so it’s kind of a win win.
The rumors of a satellite enabled iPhone might change this calculus again. Time will tell on that one.
Even for a typical day hikers these things can save lives. It's surprisingly common for people to get lost a couple hundred yards off the trail, and even remain close to the trail even as they wander around all lost. This can easily happen on a day hike.
Certain recreational activities are in fact new as hobbies, at least at scale. Skiing, mountaineering, and camping were once things you did out of necessity, not for funsies.
For example, our records for recreational skiing stretch back basically 300 years. Mountaineering has been done practically forever, but as a mass hobby it’s also basically 250 or so years old. The idea that you’d do it for fun rather than as a spiritual quest or to catch a lost sheep is a fairly new idea.
Hiking is a bit more debatable. Humans have walked on local trails for practical and recreational purposes forever. Some European trails are clearly very old, so that’s hardly new. But I think the idea of backpacking deep into the woods for fun has exploded in popularity over the past century, and certainly got a huge kick in the pants with the creation of the national park system.
Well, whether we mean the past century or the basically the entire existence of the United States, it's certainly much older than the GPS devices we're talking about, which was the sort of timeframe I had in mind when I said it is not a "fad." If we mean a couple hundred years then we could also call driving a car newfangled and faddish.
Yes, but that actually somewhat reinforces my general point if you think about it. Robin Hood hid in the woods because that’s where the power of the state couldn’t reach him. The legend tips it’s hat to the general understanding that deep forests were effectively stateless territory beyond the reach of the law.
For most of human history untamed woods and mountains have been dangerous, unordered places. This is where political dissidents, bandits, and runaway slaves have gone specifically because they’re not places that most people wanted to go given the choice. That’s why the legend of Robin Hood had him there rather than in a safe house in London.
Living in the woods was for bandits. But it's not obvious that the idea was less popular then than now -- one of the earliest references to Robin Hood is just a complaint that the stories are so popular they're damaging the spiritual fabric of society.
The difference between living in the woods and backpacking through the woods is that when backpacking you don't expect to forage for your own food - you bring it in with you.
There is otherwise no difference; backpacking and hiking are separate activities.
Pre-COVID many outdoor recreational activities as measured by stats like national park visits were up. (Some others like skiing I believe were down.) But without digging up a lot numbers, the parent's basic point squares with my understanding.
You can buy them used for cheaper, and pay $15/mo when you need it (backpacking trips, etc) and pause the service the rest of the time. The preset messages are unlimited across all plans.
They're super common now for backcountry hikers and trail runners. The plans start at $15 a month on a per-month plan (no lock in).
There has been speculation that Apple would build this into their phones, which IMHO would be a killer feature. Imagine having an emergency feature that could be used anywhere on earth. How much would you pay per text? $5 per text message would be an absolute bargain in many of these remote locations.
> There has been speculation that Apple would build this into their phones
I'm not sure how... the InReach (and similar products) are a Iridium satellite communication system that requires a bit more heft in the signal (up and down).
> Enhanced Battery Life Up to (4) hours of talk time, (30) hours of standby
for a non-smart phone.
I'm not sure how Apple would be able to incorporate a "no cell phone tower in sight" system... without also packing on the rest of the iridium system and making a much more bulky device.
This would likely be a very high-cost option, but it does seem to be possible. The key is that these satellites are much closer to earth than Iridium, I guess.
Garmin inReach devices are very small. They only support messaging, not voice phone calls, so the antennas are short and battery life is pretty good. It could be completely possible to integrate that functionality into a large smartphone.
When there was speculation before the consensus seemed to be it was unlikely for technical reasons.
Also, while sure it would be nice if something were a no/low-cost add-on to a regular smartphone, the average consumer probably wouldn't pay much extra, much less an incremental subscription fee. And there's something to be said for a rugged, potentially safety-critical, standalone device that's separate from your phone.
I would absolutely pay for this feature and it will be enough of differentiator for me to pick specific phone model. I live close to major metro area and I do not have cell connection on a regular basis starting from ski resort with spotty connection (does not work at all on some runs) to walk (not even hike) in the closest state park. Ability to use Messenger withtout cell is easily $200-300 feature I would pay for.
On antenna - you can probably build purpose-specific satellites for text messaging that does not require big antenna. Iridium is 485miles high orbit - you can probably have satellites at closer to 150-200 miles elevation
You don’t have to be particularly intense to find value in a full fledged GPS. We just do a lot of day hikes and a few overnighters, and the 64st ($300-400) has been immensely valuable. Considering that the inreach eliminates the need for a separate rescue beacon, that’s a cost and weight savings. If you’re even more marginally intense than I, one of these is less a toy and more a life saving necessity.
Dedicated GPS units are faster, more reliable, and easier to keep going in the field than your phone. You’ll never have them display a blank square because you lost LTE and it didn’t buffer that map segment. A lot of them will also record your hikes for overlay onto Google Earth later, which is nice. I personally have a large number of the local hot springs recorded into mine, which is very important when they’re off road and off trail.
Not saying dedicated units are not useful, but there are local-only mapping applications for smartphones, too. OsmAnd is a good example, it uses OpenStreetMap data which can be downloaded to local storage (by region). It supports local-only driving/walking/transit directions, too.
I’ve generally found the GPS only resolution of my phone to be greatly inferior to my Garmin. In cities cell phones depend heavily on cell towers to boost GPS resolution. Out in the back woods this difference becomes more stark.
I can also keep a GPS running longer with less power. My 64st will last an entire day on two NiMH batteries, and it takes less available power to charge. Cell phones do a lot more, but that “more” comes at a cost of energy consumption.
You can download as many offline maps as you want (the entire US can fit quite easily on modern phones), you get offline pathfinding, and offline maps have elevation contour lines and hill shading. The maps themselves are also much more detailed compared to Google or Apple when it comes to hiking trails.
Most of these smart phone apps are pretty bad at providing even driving directions in the back country. Plenty of times I’ve had either Apple or Google fail to recognize a forest service road, which I presume is in a freely available file somewhere, and tell me to park and walk miles to the trailhead. I’ve learned the hard lesson to have a backup plan just for navigating to the trailhead, let alone once I’m on the trail.
This gets back to whether the road in question is something you should direct the average smartphone user down given that they'll probably blindly follow the instructions. In many cases, the answer is no. If they know (or tink they know what they're doing), they can make their own decisions.
I'd actually much rather a smartphone routing algorithm err on the side of caution in this regard.
That’s a really good point that I’ve never thought about. Some of the roads I’ve driven on were very much in the “you know what your ground clearance is, right?” category. It’s probably for the best that Apple and google don’t blindly send people that way.
I own one because I backpack and frequently go quite deep in the back country (err, at least I used to before having children, but I intend to get back out there once they're a little bit older).
There are several areas within 5-10 miles of Apple's Cupertino HQ that have no cell service - the nearby mountains lead to valleys where I assume it's not economical to install cell towers.
I was in both Napa and Point Reyes a couple weeks back and the AT&T cell reception was pretty hit or miss. Heck, I'm about 45 miles west of Boston and the cell reception at my house is at least variable.
The Reddit thread seems to be largely given over to speculation about the complete collapse of society globally which is, in my opinion, getting just a little bit carried away and anyway not really informative.
I mean yes, but when your province experiences over a 4 month period:
* Record heat wave
* Record forest fires
* Record rainfall
* Tornadoes for the first time in history
* And now record flooding
It's hard not to feel a little apocalyptic.
Especially while most of the people in charge and seemingly 60% of the voters still want to hand-wave these away as one-offs, and unusual, ignoring the trend or the density of unusual/record event.
Yeah, I noticed that a bit, too. I originally meant the megathread post itself. I try not to read too many comments in such threads on Reddit; regardless of the topic ;)
Here's an article that gives people a better sense of how severe this is. I have lived in Southern BC for 40 years and cannot remember there ever being so many simultaneously affected areas from rain.
Some folks in Vancouver are saying they are unaffected... well what you really mean is you haven't noticed yet. There will absolutely be ripple effects. Even in Victoria we had a general "do not drive" advisory yesterday, and good luck getting a plumber if you need one this week.
I know city folks who have worked for the BC government in emergency management and are now stocking up on essentials...
I think many people reading this don't realize that there are road closures ... and then these.
It's not "you shouldn't drive today" and we have some flaggers chewing gum, it's "100s of meters of road no longer exist" kind of damage. Do that in enough places at the same time and it will be months before roads are back to normal. Enough time for severe supply shortages in many places.
Also the Black Press and Glacier Media chains of local BC papers (i.e. Burnaby Now, Chilliwack Progress, Tri-Cities News, etc.) are carrying a great deal of coverage of the impact on their local areas. The people saying that they are unaffected are entitled to be as content as they like... for today.
More people need to think about their emergency preparedness. We're not talking about permanent societal collapse; just a week-long collapse of electricity, food supply, water, transportation, or other critical goods.
If you live in a cold climate: go buy an indoor safe propane heater right now, with a supply of propane. Its not that expensive (maybe $100) for the value you will get out of it in the coming years. It can single-handedly be the difference between being able to hunker down in your home, and having to rely on external support that you'll pray is there for you when the time comes. A carbon monoxide detector is also good to pair with it, to be safe. Blankets as well.
Water is easy, though pretty large volume. Food also isn't as hard as it used to be; having a weeks supply of emergency rations is fine, but consider: Soylent, Huel, etc. Their powder form has a published shelf life of a year, its volumetrically dense, nutritionally complete, only requires water to make, and tastes pretty good.
CASH. Some way to start fire. Candles. A couple flashlights. Batteries (the huge ones made for camping are fantastic, though expensive). Two way radios with very long-range are also a fantastic investment; imagine its the winter, power & cell service is down, and a loved one has to try a local store for some supply you forgot.
With BC there's a substantial geography component. When a highway washes out it's often 100s of km detour. In contrast, for substantial portions of Alberta, a highway washout often means just a jump over to the next township road . . . which are about every mile (cuz those were the units of measure at the time they were laid out).
Yes, there are quite a number of choke points that are unavoidable in BC. Alberta is pretty much flat with some mild elevation changes and lots of parallel roads. In BC it is the opposite, the z-axis dominates everything.
Fair enough, I had the more populated parts of Alberta in mind but there is plenty of it that is elevated. Even so, it doesn't dominate the road network to the degree that it does in BC, where you are either in Vancouver or clinging to the side of a mountain (or a glacier).
Compounded by areas with sparse infrastructure, like B.C. I've done the drive from Washington to Alaska twice, and once the road was washed out somewhere not terribly far north of Vancouver, which necessitated a near 1,100 KM detour inland!
I agree we need to deal with global warming. We also need to continue getting better at dealing with disasters. Thankfully, so far our ability to deal with natural disasters is outpacing the increased frequency.
While Frequency Of Natural Disasters Is Increasing, Related Death Tolls Are Actually Decreasing
I think it's more nuanced than this. Like you're right that reducing consumption/commerce would help but it has trade-offs that lots of people don't jive with and isn't really the root of the problem which is waste. There is zero issue with goods made and distributed using renewables, or goods where non-renewables are reclaimed (i.e. metals, glass, certain plastics).
The problem is right now governments and enterprise is mostly focused on fixing supply side of the climate change and sustainability problem. Not enough is being done or discussed to reduce demand. Focusing on consumption changes is just as important as focusing on supply issue IMO.
Zero, but that's not really the point. It's when you're looking at policy changes you need to pick a direction and set goals. And I think "make consumption sustainable" is way more achievable then "reduce consumption." Because the only scalable way to reduce consumption is to make most people poorer. It's hard to herd billions of people to do something against their interest.
Private sector does really well in a lot of spaces, but despite being public infrastructure, most highways and roadworks built in Canada are already built by private sector employees working under contract.
Those public sector employees foaming at the mouth? Those are the ones who are responsible for making sure that the roads, highways and infrastructure are fit for purpose, including safety. But hey, why would we want anyone providing oversight of private corporations right?
You want emergency, purpose built solutions built by a mission oriented team? May I point you in the direction of the Canadian Military Engineers (you know, government workers?).
Interestingly, there is a railroad line that goes north from Vancouver, through Whistler and Pemberton, but takes a different route than Highway 99 to get to Lillooet[1]. The highway (aka The Duffey, as it passes Duffey Lake) gains and then loses something like 1000m of elevation, whereas the railroad line is much flatter and travels along Gates Lake, Anderson Lake, and Seton Lake. There are dirt/gravel roads there too, but I'm not sure if they are used in the winter.
The railroad route is not used much these days, partly because of all the trains that fell into the lake due to how windy (edit: that's windy as in lots of turns, not windy as in lots of air blowing over it) the track is (e.g. [2]).
The Hurley and the Highline roads typically become snowmobile only. I saw on Facebook somewhere that there was a slide on highline and that a truck/trailer RV combo jackknifed in the middle.
In January 2016, the cable-stayed bridge over the Nipigon River in northern Ontario that is the only road link between eastern and western Canada was closed when it began to buckle at an expansion joint.
There are quite a few single-points-of-failure on the road from Halifax to Vancouver, each of which would cause at least a few 100 to maybe even more than 1000 km detours through country that really isn't ready to deal with any kind of extra traffic. Especially North of Sault ste. Marie all the way to Thunder bay and between Vancouver and Calgary.
Any problem there and you're going to be driving 100's of km on logging roads, unpaved, no facilities (gas, food).
Railways to the east are also washed out. [1] And the farm country in the cities of Abbotsford and Chilliwack to the east of Vancouver, which supplies most of the local dairy & poultry, is now either completely flooded or cut off. [2]
This is kind of a big deal for shipping. Approximately $200 billion goods/year travel through Vancouver, including millions of (metric) tonnes of grain bound for Asia, and imports of Chinese goods bound for the rest of Canada. Most of that traffic now needs to find another route until repairs are made.
A dairy farmer in Abbotsford is quoted as having only 5 days of feed. Consider the economic damage if farmers have to kill livestock, and can't even get them to a meat packing facility to recoup any part of their losses.
Two are cut - the washout is on the eastern-most line heading to Kamloops about halfway up from Chilliwack. That's the most direct rail line to the rest of Canada.
Going through the US and via Spokane is quite a detour.
Also not all rail lines are created equal. The northern-orientated line that heads to Prince George can't carry the same capacity.
Forks WA is currently completely inaccessible by car. Extensive flooding everywhere. All highways and roads are closed. Connecting forest service roads have washed out.
I5 around Bellingham was cut off yesterday night, and all the highways that ran parallel to it have issues. Right now, south bound lanes open only. So you can escape Vancouver, but you can't get back in.
Forks is famous or its rain, but yesterday was the worst in recent memory. Several rivers hit record flood levels.
It's pretty rough. A friend got stuck out there around 9AM yesterday. He is use to closures and taking forest road detours, but we checked with DOT and DNR and all routes were closed. We tried to set him up with a hotel, but most in Forks were flooded by noon. I've seen videos of people boating down main street.
A friend has a AirBNB out there and the one grocery store in town is on high ground, so luckily my stuck friend had a comfortable night. We found a trail out, so he parked his company truck at the head and is hiking the 4 miles out. Another friend should be picking him up in a few minutes.
If their grandparents need any help, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
The other day, I was in Whistler and tried to use Google Maps to route back to Vancouver. It wanted me to take logging roads through the back country.. roads that are actually deactivated and impossible to traverse unless you have a trail bike perhaps. That’s Canada for you…
I'd say "that's Google for you" but really it's whatever variant of Dijkstra's algorithm they (and other map services) use. If somebody puts the roads on a map, there will be network conditions that suggest they might be useful... whether or not they actually exist in a usable condition.
I've never had Google try to take me anywhere really ridiculous and I've played with its routing algorithm in places like Death Valley and it does seem to avoid "interesting" shortcuts if there's a more reasonable alternative.
But once you get below well-traveled paved roads, you probably want some local knowledge because there's not a lot of mapping data that differentiated between a well-graded, good condition dirt road and a potentially seasonal road that you probably want high clearance 4WD for (and know how to use it).
There's something called the TIGER database. [1] Of course, that needs to be populated and updated somehow and Google probably applies various corrections. But there are plenty of tracks, especially in the American West, where their status as a "road" is somewhat a function of weather and opinion.
>> I have a suspicion that gmaps infers roads from photographs, and some of the roads are not roads at all.
> There's something called the TIGER database. [1] Of course, that needs to be populated and updated somehow and Google probably applies various corrections.
That's for the US though, it wouldn't cover Canada (though Canada probably has an equivalent).
IIRC, Google actually has a fairly large team of cartographers keeping Google Maps up to date. In addition to satellite and aerial photographs, and other maps, Google also has the benefit of Street View cars to give it on-the-ground data plus GPS tracks of customers using Google Maps on their phones.
On OpenStreetMap, there's a layer that shows all the GPS tracks that its users have uploaded, all superimposed on each other (though last I checked it hadn't been updated in some time). It's pretty easy to make out real roads from that data.
We made a go of getting back from Mt. Hood in Oregon to Seattle without taking I5 or I82. The only route viable was on US Forest service roads though the mountains, with around 40 miles unpaved.
While Google does do this all-too-often, last summer I drove from Pemberton to the lower mainland over the backroads by Lilllooet Lake and Harrison Lake.
I have an AWD Subaru, but other than a couple spots the road would have been fine in any FWD sedan.
That's probably not the road you mentioned but nonetheless.
Bingo. There is literally one way to get from Vancouver to Whistler: the Sea to Sky/99. And it’s a highway.
There are no other links, which is why even when you choose “avoid highways”, you still get put on the 99 between Squamish and Whistler, since that’s literally the only road that connects the two. You get put on some alternative backroads between Squamish and Vancouver, which are horrible to use (it was the only option at times while the 99 was being upgraded for the Olympics)
I mean, sure, it's over 3 times longer. Even if you were going from Lillooet to Vancouver, no map is going to give you 12->1 as the route, it'll tell you to take 99 down.
To folks saying "Vancouver will be fine, everything comes in on boats", here is an info sheet from the city of Vancouver detailing exactly where the food comes from. As you can see, meat, grain, and dairy will be heavily affected if trucks can't get from the Fraser Valley on east into town.
The majority of, well, everything in Canada comes from China (as with all countries). And it all arrives via port of Vancouver.
Christmas shopping is going to be interesting this year, unless they get the freight moving asap.
It is disappointing to see some people thinking this is not a big deal. Please don't spread that kind of misinformation.
We had multiple highways closed over southern BC, many roads down, power outages, municipalities evacuated, and tons of homes flooded in towns and cities all over southern BC. This is affecting a hell of a lot more than whether we can get to the rest of the country by road. There is almost no one who is not impacted. I'm on Vancouver Island and houses are having their basements flood, conking out heaters. Meritt is evacuated. The Malahat highway was closed. Ferries were cancelled. Various roads are GONE. Like - the asphalt is now in a river. Folks are getting airlifted out of highways by military copters.
This is unprecedented bad shit here - don't minimize it.
It's only a handful of months since we were hearing about unprecedented 45C+ temperatures and towns burning down in minutes
edit: looked it up: peak of 49.6°C (121°F) June 29 2021, Lytton, BC. That's Death Valley/Saudi Arabia temps, in a place full of trees on a major river, above 50°N.
HN has long declared itself an "Everything is Fine" zone.
While you are here it is important to remember that "Everything is Fine". Suggesting that things might not be fine is a good pathway to being flagged or at least downvoted. Since everything is fine, the only motivation you would have for suggesting it's not, is to create trouble for political reasons, which is clearly against HN guidelines.
It's pretty clear that Everything is Fine because most of us have invested our lives on future prosperity. We're working hard on tough problems because tomorrow will be far brighter than today. The funding our companies receive is based on the promise of future economic growth.
If it were some how the case that everything was not fine (and again, to be crystal clear, Everything is Fine), then many people here would be thrown into a very uncomfortable emotional place, since it would call into question nearly all of our assumptions about the world that give us meaning. But of course we are comfortable, because Everything is Fine.
Are their problems? Of course! Otherwise we wouldn't need startups and we wouldn't need VC funding. If you see a problem the answer is simple: why not find the solution and pitch it in the next YC round?
All problems are just opportunities for startup disruption, waiting to be solved. They're exciting! So don't worry too much, and most importantly, remember that Everything is Fine.
A different article[1] I read with a similar headline has this claim:
> To leave the Lower Mainland of BC, you would have to use Highway 99, Highway 1, or the Coquihalla.
I'm not at all familiar with the area. Are there really only 3 roads between Vancouver and the rest of Canada without going through Washington? That seems like such a low number.
Vancouver is on the mouth of Fraser River on basically a combination of glacial scouring and sandy infill. The coast immediately adjacent to Vancouver (and indeed, even somewhat inland) is basically your typical fjord system. Thus, Vancouver is surrounded by the west by the Salish Sea, and mountains on all other sides, asides from the sandy coast that stretches south towards Seattle.
Crossing from Vancouver to the Canadian plains requires crossing two main mountain ranges--the Pacific range and the Rocky Mountains. The main river systems here are oriented primarily in a north-south direction, which means they aren't a great help in finding water gaps in the mountains. However, the next major cities to the east in Canada are Edmonton and Calgary, which means any natural highway route is going to want to generally veer north out of Vancouver anyways.
There are basically three crossings of the Continental Divide worth mentioning in lower British Columbia: Highway 16 (the road to Edmonton), Highway 1 (the road to Calgary), and Highway 3 (which hugs the border). In the Pacific Range, these dwindle down to three highways leaving Vancouver itself, Highway 7 and Highway 1 that leave on the north and south banks of the Fraser respectively, and Highway 99 that jumps over to the next fjord north before making its way inland. Somewhat upstream of Vancouver, at Hope, Highway 1 crosses the river and meets up with Highway 7 to continue following the Fraser River due north, while Highway 5 heads vaguely northeast along the Coquihalla, and Highway 3 splits off from Highway 5 shortly thereafter to continue primarily east near the border. Between the two mountain ranges, the connections of roads is rather more complicated, but either way, you're going to filter down to the same bottlenecks when crossing one of the mountains.
And all of those roads I described crossing the Pacific Range? Every single one of them spend substantial portions of its time in a narrow river valley and is currently severed in several places because of washouts. However many roads you want to count it--they are all cut right now.
Yes. Vancouver sits in a little triangle of land in the south-west (bottom-left?) corner of Canada, completely surrounded by mountains to the north and east. We heavily rely on the highway south through the state of Washington.
That's a really long route and the ferries don't carry that many people compared to a road.
(I once took a ferry from Prince Rupert to Skidegate on the Queen Charlotte islands and back. It was an 800 passenger ferry, temporarily replacing a 300 passenger ferry I think on the same route which was taken out of service for maintenance. The ferry in question was the ill-fated Queen of the North, which ran aground on a different route a few years later and sank.)
Re: MV Queen of the North, a 20 minute ferry ride is thrilling. A couple of hours is too long. The QotN route was 14 hours?! Terrifying ordinarily, then exponentially so on its last voyage.
Prince Rupert to Skidegate (the route we took) is 7 hours, and the reverse trip would have been about the same. I thought it was rather a pleasant ride. Wikipedia says the QotN's regular route from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert was 18 hours. I'd probably get a little bored, though I'm sure the scenery is amazing.
I think most passengers don't expect the ship to scrape it's bottom on a rock at full speed. It sunk in the middle of the night, so probably a lot of the passengers were asleep before they had to scramble to the lifeboats. All but two people got off.
Rupert to Skidegate is mostly open sea, but I could imagine navigating some of those narrow fjords could be a little nerve-wracking. I think they have to time their routes to account for the huge tidal changes they get there, which cause some pretty strong currents.
Incidently, the QotN was the only ship in the Canadian ferry fleet that didn't have a double hull. Not sure it would have made a difference in this case.
Open up the google maps of BC and turn on satellite view and you'll see why. The whole province is all mountain with the only roads snaking through the few river valleys and mountain passes.
Big province, but remarkably little actual habitable land.
The vicinity of Prince George looks like it has enough habitable land to fit the whole population of California into a small corner, but I agree that most of the province is very hostile to human life and transportation networks. I'm from Oregon. We have Mount Hood. It's weird to see a mountain that looks like Mount Hood next to another mountain that looks like Mount Hood, in front of a dozen more mountains that look like Mount Hood, in front of hundreds or thousands more, and so on. It's intimidating even just to look at.
I mean this with no snark at all: go look at a map of BC. For a lot of that province, three roads going in and out is luxury, must be a big city or something. Go not terribly far north of Vancouver, and for a lot of populated areas there is the road.
Vancouver is essentially surrounded by a combination of water, mountains, and the United States (with more mountains). In general, there aren't a lot of routes through mountain ranges.
I live inthe interior, about 5hrs from Vancouver, and we are only cut off from Vancouver and Calgary...but our grocery stores are now out\very low on vegetable and dairy.
I suspect some panic buying, but very sobering to see how fragile our food delivery system is.
Well, according to a press conference with the mayor of Abbotsford on Nov 16th at 9 pm pst [1], 50% of poultry, dairy, and eggs consumed in BC come from the Sumas Prairie region. This is an area that has just been ordered to evacuate and further flooding poses significant risk to life.
Looks like the supply of the food is going to be pretty harmed if the flooding continues.
I'd expect this to be a bigger problem for Edmonton and Calgary than for Vancouver. The former cities now have no road access to the port of Vancouver.
I wonder this too. Vancouver Island was hit by a drought this summer and the (not unusual) torrent caused "water to flow where it has never flowed before" according to the road engineers.
Soil biology does some weird thing to soils in the boundaries.
Fungally dominated soils have a greatly increased mineral and water availability due to the meddling of the fungi in soil chemistry. But if you dry out fungi enough, they become hydrophobic, like sphagnum does, and this can increase the likelihood of flash flooding. In a forest environment, the fungi increase canopy, and the canopy mechanically slows the water. Except in deciduous forests in the winter, there is no canopy, only mostly-bare branches. Although typically BC and northern Washington seem to be overpopulated with conifers so that may not apply in this case.
You don't need a covid19 test now to drive into the USA. You do need to be fully vaccinated and to declare you have no symptoms. This is new with the border re-opening for non essential travel just about a week ago.
You do need a covid19 test (quick antigen test is OK) to fly from Canada to the US.
You do need a PCR covid19 test taken within the past 72 hours to re-enter canada by land or air, per CBSA requirements.
Yes, I know. Only Canada is requiring it. Nothing you said here refutes my statement. I'm talking about driving from Vancouver to another part of Canada. Because of the content of the article. To commute via the US, a test is required (because of Canada's current policy).
Clearly you don't know folks working in the industry; Trade and Transportation drivers have been and are exempt from testing requirements. My brother has been driving to and from the area around Winnipeg through North and South Dakota as a truck driver during the entire pandemic, and was vaccinated early by the US. (also, non-anecdotal source -> https://travel.gc.ca/travel-covid/travel-restrictions/exempt... )
The overall tone of the thread is about logistics in a port city that is the main port of entry to Canada. Individually, the testing requirements are very disruptive, but it's one less issue that may have impacted supply chains within the BC lower mainland, and an avenue to ship goods out, albeit more expensively.
This isn't (generally speaking) a thread about COVID restrictions, but if you want to sound off about that more, feel free, but it shouldn't be a shock that in a) a global pandemic, and b) a series of natural disasters, that no one really gives a fuck about how inconvenient travel has become for non-essential activities.
Fair enough. My responses might be slightly shaped by the fact I was going to drive to Vancouver next week to visit a friend and am flying to Europe in 2 weeks.
> that no one really gives a fuck about how inconvenient travel has become for non-essential activities
Plenty of people do. Hence why so many countries (literally the whole EU) are trying to facilitate travel.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that the EU was impacted by a massive critical infrastructure failure induced by a natural disaster.
Like I said, this isn't a discussion or debate about COVID restrictions, and while it sucks that you might be temporarily inconvenienced in relation to your travel plans, as a person who lives and works in the lower mainland and has several friends and family members who are either homeless or temporarily stranded, temporary travel inconveniences rank somewhere between "oh well", and "could you please not, while we clean up?".
I drive quite a lot and haven’t been required to take a Covid test after several years of driving during Covid. Bottom line: if you’re crossing an international border, you’re gonna have to do some stuff.
I'm double vaxxed. I can enter the EU without a test. I can enter the US without a test. I can get an EU Green Pass without a test.
So why is Canada's policy such? They REQUIRE proof of vaccination to enter, AND a test? Why?
Edit - and yes I'm hung up on this. I don't want to pay $200+ dollars for a test I don't need. I got Covid in wave 1 before the first lockdown, I've done everything asked of us; masked, locked down, had to shut down multiple businesses, got vaccinated as soon as it was available to me, and they still want to make me take a useless test?
I can't decide what's worse; our mediocre government or the fact any citizens at all support this theatre...
You are 100% correct. Our leaders have no incentive to treat this crisis in a calm, reasonable way and that has led to vastly over-reaching interventions in people's lives no matter how well meaning the intentions are.
Vaccinated people can still catch, carry, and communicate COVID to others... and if you got vaccinated before the summer, your antibody levels are probably not as high as you think. Vaccination is not a binary thing, in terms of how it actually works.
If an unvaccinated person catches COVID from you, it doesn't matter whether or not you (the carrier) were vaccinated... The virus that ravages and possibly kills your subsequent victim is just as dangerous to the unvaccinated.
It seems November is a hard month of rain in certain areas. When I was in Kuwait in 2018 they had a record flood on November 4th greater than anything in the modern history going back to the late 18th century when they civilized the area. Then on the 14th there was a flood that was 3x greater than the one on the 4th.
I was also reading that this week southern Egypt is having an extreme problem with flooding that killed 3 soldiers.
There are many smaller communities that are cut off due to floods and mudslides too. For example, I live in Chilliwack, about 90km East of Vancouver, and we’re completely cut off from anywhere else - the three highways entering the city are all closed. All rail lines are damaged or flooded.
Hope, a bit further to the East, is another community that is completely cut off. It’s full of stranded travellers right now.
Once people realized we were cut off, the hoarding mentality took hold; most gas stations are out of gas and grocery stores are emptying. Hopefully the supply chain bounces back quickly.
Well if one ever needed evidence that too many programmers like to think they know the answers before understanding the problem, this thread provides it. :-/
Mobile services in southern British Columbia have generally been steady on the Telus network through all the atmospheric river activity but Bell has been having problems:
Will this be a significant impact to most people living in Vancouver?
All land freight can come from the US. COVID doesn't affect this.
International freight will come through port.
Agricultural communities just outside of greater Vancouver are cut off from each other. Canada restricts milk products and eggs, so I expect these will run out. What else do people in Vancouver relay on from the Fraser Valley? Toilet paper?
This happens in the prairies from time to time. Last year I got stuck in a Blizzard on my way to Winnipeg. All highways in the southern province shut down for a bit. We got stuck in a gully in the car until a snowplow came and saved us.
I watched a video series of a road trip from Victoria to somewhere in Yukon.[0] After getting to the mainland and past the Vancouver metro area, the quality of roads is striking. The further north they went, the more nothing they saw.
Possibly useless comparison with a similar infrastructure failure: a section of I-85 on the way between the Atlanta perimeter and where a lot of people commute from caught on fire and collapsed. It took a little over a month to repair. That's with other worse but usable alternate routes, so maybe it'll go faster here.
I wonder if this will affect filming in any serious way. Might be too early to tell, but can anyone knowledgeable of the Vancouver film industry comment?
If you had to go through Mexico to get out of San Diego it would still be a really big deal, and would be commonly described as "cut off from the rest of the US."
As of a few seconds ago, this is the best route Google Maps can find to go from Vancouver to Kelowna: https://archive.md/we9X5
You have to go pretty far into the US on this route.
Edit: Incidentally, asking for directions from Vancouver to Edmonton currently causes Google Maps to fail and give you a route that's closed: https://archive.md/7lLu4
If someone is actually planning to drive a route like that, be absolutely sure to check the conditions of the mountain passes in the US that you will cross. The linked route has you going over highway 2 and steven's pass, which right now is projected to get a ton of snow: https://wsdot.com/travel/real-time/mountainpasses/Stevens Typically travel over these passes requires snow chains in your car, and at times they can be entirely shut until snow removal can occur.
One could also take the ferry to Vancouver Island, drive north to Port Hardy, take another ferry to Prince Rupert, then drive on a highway that isn't actually washed out.
I think the issue is less to do with commuters or people who would like to get to Calgary and more the fact that trucks won't be able to move in and out of the city for a while. A messy supply chain just got messier.
To put this in context, the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia are being hammered with extremely heavy rain. Roads are being washed out or struck with landslides.
They'll be maxed out capacity wise almost immediately, compared to a working four lane road ferries have extremely small capacity. But better something than nothing.
So you can either go to an island (few hour trip) or to the north (many hours) And then once there another half day to get down to the interior, which when the roads were open was just a 4-5hr trip.
So even the ferry ride out would take very long time to get to the next major city.
I misinterpreted the headline the mean that the city was continuously surrounded by roads, e.g. a wild animal trying to reach the city could not without crossing a road somewhere.
Not OP but a city block isn't an entire city. If you read their comment again without prejudice you may be able to understand what they meant, even if it does require a little imagination.
Plenty of cities have greenways that lead into parks considered "part of" the city. Such parkland might not feel like the inner city, indeed ideally it has minimal street intrusion, but still can be part of the fabric of good city living.
I think the sentence is best read as "a wild animal could not reach the city without crossing a road that is not considered part of vancouver proper". Seems clear that that's the intended meaning
He also mentioned the weather cleared since yesterday, so floods should start to subside. You can follow the updates here[2]
[0] https://www.drivebc.ca/mobile/pub/events/id/DBC-35180.html
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Vancouver,+BC,+Canada/Abbots...
[2] https://www.drivebc.ca/#listView