1y ago

Niagara region declares state of emergency to prepare for influx of eclipse viewers

www.winnipegfreepress.com

Non-Paywall Article

9 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.

9 comments