Nottheonion
A tourist region can’t handle people? It’s not like a billion families are suddenly going to show up for the eclipse. People work.
A tourist region can’t handle people?
That’s like asking “a hospital can’t handle patients?” with no understanding of the effects the pandemic (and specifically ‘mah raghts’ hillbillies) had on the healthcare system – and will for years to come as we recover. NO industry can handle a 50-fold demand, even for a day, without collapsing.
The numbers - a million in a day - are going to be absolutely absurd. I don’t expect it, I don’t predict it, but if traffic needs to be blocked on the way in to prevent another million people coming, maybe declaring an emergency is good to enable rapid mobilization and better funding for emergency services. If it takes days to clean up from the traffic, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Who’s saying a million?
Are people just driving through or stopping? There’s no hotel or parking vacancies that could handle that, so they are going there for what? To sit in their cars?
Really, the article is shit and doesn’t really give any details at all. They could be worried about running out of food for all we know. Garbage reporting.
Niagara gets >8M tourists a year, they are expecting to get 1M people in a single day and a lot of people are going to be taking the day off to drive down and see the eclipse. It’s going to be the single worst day of traffic that the area has ever had.
Niagara gets >8M tourists a year
More like over 13 million, according to their tourism site.
What is the emergency, exactly? More traffic and no parking spots for all those cars?
The article doesn’t mention anything alarming, and since tourism in the region has been down quite a bit since the pandemic, this could be a major boom for local business.
A state of emergency would be more appropriate if that many people were expected in a conservation area or provincial park. But not in an area designed for events and tourists.
CBC article is better: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/solar-eclipse-niagara-falls-1.7159987
Officials say they are concerned the large number of people could overwhelm traffic, emergency services and cellphone networks.
There’s way to declare a state of “we temporarily need additional resources even though it it isn’t actually an emergency.” But since these kinds of scenarios are rare, we probably don’t need such a state to exist so it’s just declaring a “state of emergency.”
Sure it’s called a state of emergency, but the additional resources that are being called in will know the situation so it’s not like it’s going to be martial law in Niagara. There will just be more health care staff, more first responders, more police for crowd control available along with better contingency planning for if the cellphone network gets overloaded.
I suppose we could fault them for not planning sooner, but in fairness politicians aren’t astronomers and even if they did some planning they couldn’t have predicted that media outlets would be promoting Niagara being the best spot to go to see the eclipse.
Also putting out a state of emergency gets more attention in the media than a mayor making a statement saying “we expect traffic jams and a lot of other problems with a lot of people coming, so it might be good for some people to consider viewing it from Hamilton instead?” Getting in the media cycle may result in a lot of people realizing that Niagara might not be the best place to view the eclipse and go elsewhere.
It sounds crazy at first, but it actually is a sensible precaution. Think about if you got a million people there and some accident happens and a bunch of people die because Niagara doesn’t have the resources to handle it.
Cbc certainly did much better job explaining it. Makes sense.
Or, more simply: no cars moving from extreme congestion = no emergency vehicles moving, either.
The infrastructure there can’t handle a million people.
