Ceciltron posted:

Northwest passage would make a good replacement national anthem for Anglo-Canadia.

Ceciltron posted:

Ahhh always good to know we're on something awful, where reddit level atheist edgehavers can make jokes about the destruction of centuries and millenia-old cultural centers, comparing these to 15 year old mining settlements.

eXXon posted:

I think that Fort Mac will be rebuilt with bike lanes and tree-lined avenues and walkable neighbourhoods after some careful and sober reflection.

sitchensis posted:

And buildings made out of inflammable masonry, like every other city that has ever had a Great Fire of some kind.

haha no, it's just going to be lovely wood frame sprawl again



e: That's a photo posted on Reddit of a Fort Mac residential street near some of the damage. You could fit in two bike lanes, an LRT down the middle, add sidewalks and still have room for four lanes of traffic. Christ.

sitchensis posted:

You could fit in two bike lanes, an LRT down the middle, add sidewalks and still have room for four lanes of traffic. Christ.

EvilJoven posted:

eXXon posted:

I think that Fort Mac will be rebuilt with bike lanes and tree-lined avenues and walkable neighbourhoods after some careful and sober reflection.

ductonius posted:

It's actually so the road stays a reasonable width when six foot wide snowbanks get plowed up on the side of the road in the winter, but keep up with the irrational hate, did you get your full two minutes in today?

infernal machines posted:

Good lord, how does the rest of the country do it? Or is Fort Mac the only town with snow these days?

Kafka Esq. posted:

Counterpoint: Mecca or Vatican City.

quote:

Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change

The town of Fort McMurray, some four hundred miles north of Calgary, in Canada, grew up very quickly on both sides of the Athabasca River. During the nineteen-seventies, the population of the town tripled, and since then it has nearly tripled again. All this growth has been fuelled by a single activity: extracting oil from a Florida-sized formation known as the tar sands. When the price of oil was high, there was so much currency coursing through Fort McMurray’s check-cashing joints that the town was dubbed “Fort McMoney.”

Now Fort McMurray is burning. A forest fire that began to the southwest of the town on Sunday has forced the entire population—almost ninety thousand people—to evacuate. On Wednesday, Alberta’s provincial government declared a state of emergency. By yesterday, more than fifteen hundred buildings had been destroyed and the blaze had spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. It was burning so hot that that it was easily able to jump major rivers. One Canadian official described the fire as “catastrophic.” Another called it a “multi-headed monster.”

No one knows exactly how the fire began—whether it was started by a lightning strike or by a spark provided by a person—but it’s clear why the blaze, once under way, raged out of control so quickly. Alberta experienced an unusually dry and warm winter. Precipitation was low, about half of the norm, and what snow there was melted early. April was exceptionally mild, with temperatures regularly in the seventies; two days ago, the thermometer hit ninety, which is about thirty degrees higher than the region’s normal May maximum. “You hate to use the ​cliché, but it really was kind of a perfect storm,” Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the CBC.

Though it’s tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the past decade. In some areas, “we now have year-round fire seasons,” Matt Jolly, a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, recently told the Times.

“You can say it couldn’t get worse,” Jolly added, but based on its own projections, the forest service expects that it will get worse. According to a Forest Service report published last April, “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970.” Over the past three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled, and the service’s scientists project that it’s likely to “double again by midcentury.” A group of scientists who analyzed lake cores from Alaska to obtain a record of forest fires over the past ten thousand years found that, in recent decades, blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe. “This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity,” they concluded.

All of this brings us to what one commentator referred to as “the black irony” of the fire that has destroyed most of Fort McMurray.

The town exists to get at the tar sands, and the tar sands produce a particularly carbon-intensive form of fuel. (The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is, at its heart, a fight over whether the U.S. should be encouraging —or, if you prefer, profiting from—the exploitation of the tar sands.) The more carbon that goes into the atmosphere, the warmer the world will get, and the more likely we are to see devastating fires like the one now raging.

To raise environmental concerns in the midst of human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alluded to this danger at a recent news conference: “Any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there’s a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome.” And certainly it would be wrong to blame the residents of Fort McMurray for the disaster that has befallen them. As Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who is a Green Party member of British Columbia’s provincial legislature, noted, “The reality is we are all consumers of products that come from oil.”

But to fail to acknowledge the connection is to risk another kind of offense. We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility, and then we need to do something about it. The fire next time is one that we’ve been warned about, and that we’ve all had a hand in starting.

Kafka Esq. posted:

Took me three minutes. I have one toilet.

flashman posted:

You'd think a town of rugged, get the job done types would be able to handle 150 cm without freeways for roads.

quaint bucket posted:

How much of the reserve burned? I thought about it today and was wondering what the gov't gonna do about it because I can't imagine they had insurances for the houses on the Rez.

How much of Fort Mac is gone now? It sounds like it's a mix at this point and trailer parks are gone. I really hope when they rebuild it is that they will learn from New Orlean after Katrina.

infernal machines posted:

That's roughly how it works in Toronto too. We don't get anything like the snowfall of Fort Mac, or even Edmonton, but we do get snowfall. The city core was built pre-car, the roads are often one lane each way, with on street parking, but with the exception of the winter of '99, we manage without having a suburban expressway on every street.

Hal_2005 posted:

edit: Oddly enough, I agree with /pol.

Ikantski posted:

It's so wasteful for rural towns to not just be a giant condo building next to a giant cubicle building. Buncha rubes.

PT6A posted:

On the other hand, there's no good reason why a small town shouldn't be walkable or bikeable at the very least. It's not like you have so many people that things absolutely must be spread out.

Baronjutter posted:

Its weird how the article related the location from Calgary rather than much closer Edmonton.

Meat Recital posted:

Hey. Should I fill out my census this time or is it a useless piece of poo poo like the last one?

PT6A posted:

On the other hand, there's no good reason why a small town shouldn't be walkable or bikeable at the very least. It's not like you have so many people that things absolutely must be spread out.

Albino Squirrel posted:

I'm noticing that for a lot of publications, including the Guardian. I presume no reputable publication wants to expose its employees to the conditions in Edmonton.

EvilJoven posted:

European small towns loving own. Drive in, park your car, see the entire thing on foot and never want, let alone need, to get into the car until you're ready to leave.

No wonder we're so god damned fat over here, me included.

EDIT: hell, you know what the biggest part of it is, now? From the top down our society for the past 80 years has been so car centric we just can't escape it. Everything from where we work to where we live is centered around the car that most neighborhoods that have been built since I was born have been planned under the assumption that everyone will just drive to wherever they want to go. poo poo, you can't even find a modern neighborhood with a corner store that doesn't have a massive parking lot because it's shoved into the corner of the subdivision and extremely inconvenient to get to on foot.

Hal_2005 posted:

About 80% of Fort Mac is burned. The entire KM2 of burned losses would equal the entire city of Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Ottawa. Gross claims on Civil / Commercial property will tally about 3b, lump in another 2b for claims. Had Notley/Prentice decided to keep 30mm in the budget for the fire crews this all could have been shut down in about 2 days with a couple of backhoes and 2 water bombers.

edit: Oddly enough, I agree with /pol. When a friend of mine ran a bar up there, every person on staff down to the line cooks had WHMIS and Fire training. During the summers, most would night-shift and they would work on Horizon or Aurora 2. I can't say the same for your average Laval or St. John's NFLD bedroom community of equal sq. KM.

never happy posted:

WHMIS saved Fort McMurray

Hal_2005 posted:

edit: Oddly enough, I agree with /pol. When a friend of mine ran a bar up there, every person on staff down to the line cooks had WHMIS and Fire training. During the summers, most would night-shift and they would work on Horizon or Aurora 2. I can't say the same for your average Laval or St. John's NFLD bedroom community of equal sq. KM.

DariusLikewise posted:

Hey! Somebody grab the MSDS for fire! We need to know what we are dealing with here! Is everyone heading to the muster point?

apatheticman posted:

Good thing I always back into my driveway that saved me at least 5 seconds!