The gas hoarding is because of how fuel is distributed on Vancouver Island. None of it comes into Victoria by ship; it's all delivered up island and then delivered by truck. So when the highway was closed north of Victoria, people panicked thinking that Victoria was cut off. But as with basically any irrational hoarding, the only real shortage was due to increased demand. The highway is back open for single lane alternating traffic so fuel trucks can still get through.
The "gas shortage" on the island has made me realize how little I know about our supply chain. I was especially surprised there are no terminals to offload gas south of the Malahat. What happens if the Malahat is completely cutoff in an emergency like a major earthquake? This event is minor for the island but really didn't bring me much confidence.
Given Vancouver is a major port for everyone west of Manitoba there will be more irrational shortages.
I was reading about how the coldwater river in Merritt now has a completely new channel and is flowing down what used to be a street in the town. Not sure what you do in that situation. Are you just screwed if you lived on this street?
The grocery store had no mushrooms yesterday. The devastation is real and is hitting us hard in Calgary. I don’t know how much longer I can stomach living in these deplorable conditions.
I suspect they will get temp fixes in quite quickly, five or six galvanised tunnels and 300 dump trucks of gravel across a stream doesnt take long, its not particularly enviromentally friendly but my guess is that will be quietly passed without question
Receding flood waters were helping rescue efforts, but up to 100mm of rain is expected next week. The downpour had blocked off entire towns and cut access to the country’s largest port in Vancouver, disrupting already strained global supply chains.
No, a couple of culverts should fix this right up:
Spoiler!
But more seriously, just filling in rivers as a temporary fix doesn't really solve any problems anyway. Obviously they'll get temporary bridges in place which will allow them to have room to build permanent replacement structures. But in some of these places, the road itself has been undermined so much that they need to rebuild that too before it's passable. Luckily the road is divided in a lot of places and in some of the most damaged spots, they can just build an access between the two roads and have 2-lane traffic for those stretches.
From the department of cringe worthy timing on marketing...
Yeah, the timing is terrible. However, I do find it odd that such a major highway, built in an area which is the way it is due to a pump station, did not have any kind of flood barier/protection. Sure, they built canals along the highway, but nothing beyond that?
