Cue the Apocalypse
I'm about to do something almost as bizarre as publicly stating that Brian Mulroney is my sekkrit teenage crush*
I think Mel Lastman may have done something right, as mayor of Toronto.
Oh, don't get me wrong: I still think he was a grandstanding, backroom-dealing, crass, shameless showman with the long-term poliltical acumen of a cold jellied eel.** I think he was suburban in his outlook, and that he really didn't understand the nature of the downtown part of the city he was elected to govern.
And, like a lot of other Torontonians, I was embarrassed when he called in the army to help the city handle the Blizzard of 1999. We had the army. In Canada. Because of snow.
The rest of the country laughed at us. Prince Edward Island sent us snowplows and snowplow operators. Our mayor was on record saying he was "petrified" of snow.
In Canada.
The shame.
Even as I cringed and blushed, and picked my way through the drifts, I couldn't help but hear stories of how the army had actually been really useful. Had knocked on doors to check on seniors, had used its big green all-terrain vehicles to carry women in labour to hospitals (the streets weren't yet plowed, so getting to the hospital in a car or ambulance would have been challenging). They'd cleared the subway tracks.
So why, in the 35ºCelsius heat of summer 2007 am I even thinking about a blizzard in January, 1999?
Over on Punkass, sabotabby finally posted on the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995. I've been hoping she would do this for a while, because I wanted to read her thoughts on the social nature of this disaster. ***
The heat? Beyond the control of the city's government. The death rate (of 739 Chicagoans-the morgues were overwhelmed, and bodies were put into donated meat-packing trucks)? A man-made, human disaster, the product of both systemic and individual failures at all levels. Death rates were higher in poor, isolated neighbourhoods with high crime rates, because people in these neighbourhoods had no escape from their overheated apartments. They were afraid to answer their doors. Their neighbourhoods lacked amenities such as air-conditioned shops or public buildings to which they could walk. In poor neighbourhoods where many people lacked air-conditioning, people opened fire-hydrants, thereby contributing to water shortages in these neighbourhoods.
Consumption of power overwhelmed the city's electrical utilities. Calls for help overwhelmed the emergency response services, yet the mayor of Chicago was slow to raise the alarm. "'It's hot. It's very hot. But let's not blow it out of proportion": this was Mayor Richard Daley's assessment of the situation on Friday, July 14th" (link; scroll about a third of the way down. So he didn't request help from neighbouring towns, who might have provided additional ambulances, additional resources.
Over seven hundred people died because of heat and humidity. And because of power shortages. And because the mayor didn't want to overreact.
One thing I'll say for Mel Lastman: He was never afraid to overreact.
Commenter Nymphalidae at PAB offered the following comment:
Part of the problem is that northern cities like Chicago just aren’t ready to deal with the heat. Sort of like when I lived in MO they didn’t exactly plow the street so much as wait for the snow to melt. I’m from about 6 hours north of Chicago, and it’s only hot enough to merit air conditioning maybe 1 or 2 weeks a year. But it seems like cities should be gearing up for more of this, with global warming and all.
But here's the thing: cities, in general, budget based on experience and on norms. Most large organizations can't budget for the once-in-a-century disaster: to do so would be wasteful in the extreme. Just as Victoria, B.C., doesn't maintain a Toronto-sized fleet of snowplows for the three or four days a year that they have snow, most years. So, while Chicago's disaster management was teh suck, I can see why the city itself might not have had the infrastructure to cope.
Neither did Toronto have the infrastructure to deal with snowfalls greater and more sudden than any it had experienced in recent years. So we called in the army, and we grounded flights out of the airport. And people got to hospitals, and streets got shovelled, and shut-ins got checked on. And we bought some more snowplows next year, but at the time stuff needed doing, and our shameless mayor wasn't ashamed to call for help.
If I had been in labour, and taken to a hospital in a Bison, rather than having to chance my car or wait for an ambulance that couldn't negotiate on unplowed streets, I don't think I'd care whether Mel's actions were the actions of a canny urban politician who wanted to make the feds pay for Toronto's snow removal or those of an incompetent grandstanding buffoon who shamelessly called someone else to clean up after his own lack of planning.
So that's why I'm thinking about Mel Lastman and the Blizzard of 1999, in the middle of a summer heat wave.
Besides, it's nicer than thinking about how bloody hot it is.
* But only almost that bizarre. Cary Elwes was my sekkrit teenage crush. So was Ben Heppner. All the women in my family have crushed on Ben Heppner.
** I didn't vote for him, in other words.
*** You should read her post, and the New Yorker article she links. Really. Then go read Dark Age Ahead.
I think Mel Lastman may have done something right, as mayor of Toronto.
Oh, don't get me wrong: I still think he was a grandstanding, backroom-dealing, crass, shameless showman with the long-term poliltical acumen of a cold jellied eel.** I think he was suburban in his outlook, and that he really didn't understand the nature of the downtown part of the city he was elected to govern.
And, like a lot of other Torontonians, I was embarrassed when he called in the army to help the city handle the Blizzard of 1999. We had the army. In Canada. Because of snow.
The rest of the country laughed at us. Prince Edward Island sent us snowplows and snowplow operators. Our mayor was on record saying he was "petrified" of snow.
In Canada.
The shame.
Even as I cringed and blushed, and picked my way through the drifts, I couldn't help but hear stories of how the army had actually been really useful. Had knocked on doors to check on seniors, had used its big green all-terrain vehicles to carry women in labour to hospitals (the streets weren't yet plowed, so getting to the hospital in a car or ambulance would have been challenging). They'd cleared the subway tracks.
So why, in the 35ºCelsius heat of summer 2007 am I even thinking about a blizzard in January, 1999?
Over on Punkass, sabotabby finally posted on the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995. I've been hoping she would do this for a while, because I wanted to read her thoughts on the social nature of this disaster. ***
The heat? Beyond the control of the city's government. The death rate (of 739 Chicagoans-the morgues were overwhelmed, and bodies were put into donated meat-packing trucks)? A man-made, human disaster, the product of both systemic and individual failures at all levels. Death rates were higher in poor, isolated neighbourhoods with high crime rates, because people in these neighbourhoods had no escape from their overheated apartments. They were afraid to answer their doors. Their neighbourhoods lacked amenities such as air-conditioned shops or public buildings to which they could walk. In poor neighbourhoods where many people lacked air-conditioning, people opened fire-hydrants, thereby contributing to water shortages in these neighbourhoods.
Consumption of power overwhelmed the city's electrical utilities. Calls for help overwhelmed the emergency response services, yet the mayor of Chicago was slow to raise the alarm. "'It's hot. It's very hot. But let's not blow it out of proportion": this was Mayor Richard Daley's assessment of the situation on Friday, July 14th" (link; scroll about a third of the way down. So he didn't request help from neighbouring towns, who might have provided additional ambulances, additional resources.
Over seven hundred people died because of heat and humidity. And because of power shortages. And because the mayor didn't want to overreact.
One thing I'll say for Mel Lastman: He was never afraid to overreact.
Commenter Nymphalidae at PAB offered the following comment:
Part of the problem is that northern cities like Chicago just aren’t ready to deal with the heat. Sort of like when I lived in MO they didn’t exactly plow the street so much as wait for the snow to melt. I’m from about 6 hours north of Chicago, and it’s only hot enough to merit air conditioning maybe 1 or 2 weeks a year. But it seems like cities should be gearing up for more of this, with global warming and all.
But here's the thing: cities, in general, budget based on experience and on norms. Most large organizations can't budget for the once-in-a-century disaster: to do so would be wasteful in the extreme. Just as Victoria, B.C., doesn't maintain a Toronto-sized fleet of snowplows for the three or four days a year that they have snow, most years. So, while Chicago's disaster management was teh suck, I can see why the city itself might not have had the infrastructure to cope.
Neither did Toronto have the infrastructure to deal with snowfalls greater and more sudden than any it had experienced in recent years. So we called in the army, and we grounded flights out of the airport. And people got to hospitals, and streets got shovelled, and shut-ins got checked on. And we bought some more snowplows next year, but at the time stuff needed doing, and our shameless mayor wasn't ashamed to call for help.
If I had been in labour, and taken to a hospital in a Bison, rather than having to chance my car or wait for an ambulance that couldn't negotiate on unplowed streets, I don't think I'd care whether Mel's actions were the actions of a canny urban politician who wanted to make the feds pay for Toronto's snow removal or those of an incompetent grandstanding buffoon who shamelessly called someone else to clean up after his own lack of planning.
So that's why I'm thinking about Mel Lastman and the Blizzard of 1999, in the middle of a summer heat wave.
Besides, it's nicer than thinking about how bloody hot it is.
* But only almost that bizarre. Cary Elwes was my sekkrit teenage crush. So was Ben Heppner. All the women in my family have crushed on Ben Heppner.
** I didn't vote for him, in other words.
*** You should read her post, and the New Yorker article she links. Really. Then go read Dark Age Ahead.