Even the Yukon got included...

Well, this isn’t on any scale like what’s been happening South and East, but…

Us Yukoners feel so included in world affairs for a change. And we’re not happy about it.

Whitehorse got evacuated today.

It seems a Korean passenger jet had an emergency of some kind after being diverted from Alaska. They hit an emergency transponder or whatever the hell it is, and when the fighters arrived, it seems to have scared the English right out of them.

Right after I made my post about donating blood and heard Vix was OK, I went upstairs for a smoke. One of the operators came in and said the schools were being evacuated. Excuse me? The schools are being what? I phoned the school and confirmed that our children were being put on buses to go home. As I leave, I hear that a hijacked jet is coming our way, with military escort.

Excuse me?

My house is right across from the airport. I was going to go home and then take the kids to Grandma’s. A friend from work gave me a ride home, or tried to. I got turned back at the roadblock by a cop who didn’t even wanna hear about whether I lived there or not, or much of anything else.

Crap. The school bus will get through, but I won’t. So we whipped back downtown to try to beat the buses to my kids. We made it, and whisked them to my Mom’s house, which happens to be several kilometres away from the airport. It also hasn’t got a PC, so I was incommunicado so far as timely reporting, darnit.

And that’s when I found out that a possibly hijacked Korean 767 was arriving in about ten minutes, with military escort. The entire downtown area was being evacuated as much as possible. However, there was a teeny tiny problem. It would seem that the EMO (Emergency Measures Organisation) commandeered all the city transit buses. That stranded my mother downtown. We phoned around, and found a friend to pick her up. Further phone calls ensured that the rest of the family was safely away, I have a LOT of family, and many live in the same neighbourhood.

Except for the Boyz, of course. The Boyz consisted of my husband, brothers, and a couple of friends, who were ‘trapped’ in the neighbourhood. Why ‘trapped’? Well, with no wives and children to evacuate, and with the highway shut down, they wandered down to the local pub and got themselves a ringside seat, with refreshments, for the whole thing. The bar in the Airline Inn is on the top floor, and it has enormous windows that overlook the airport. They got to watch everything.

It turns out that due to the divertment of air traffic from Alaska, some of the jets were having fuel problems. A Korean 767 had a fuel emergency and somebody hit the wrong code on the emergency beacon. Due to the hyperalert status of the North American Military, fighters were on the scene immediately. There were some communications problems almost immediately. As in all command of the English language deserted them, apparently. When the plane landed, and decent communications were finally established, it all got sorted out.

Sigh. So it was the sanitized , Canadian version, with a happy ending. Unlike so many others tonight. All I hope for is that this can help end the insanity. Is this when we finally stop tolerating them? We, the Teeming Millions, know who they are. They drink in our bars, our coffeehouses, they go to our churches, they eat in our restaurants. Refuse to tolerate their presence in society any longer! Well, ok, a little difficult with state-sponsored terrorism, but I think that’ll be taken care of shortly. But the others, the home-grown frothing lunatics - if their family shuns them, if their wives and children leave them, if nobody will shelter them, if none will feed them, may finally wither. Maybe not ever die, not entirely, but wither into irrelevance.

Some of us in the North fled exactly this situation. I have friends here from Belfast, and from Pakistan. I have another friend who escaped Czechoslovakia when it was invaded by the Soviets. There’s even a few Somalis here. There used to be a safety in the isolation, a purity in it. We could whine about not being included in national affairs, and cultivate a whopping smugness in the wisdom of choosing to live in a place very far away from this…this…insane chaos.

Not anymore.

To the animals that do these things, these words:

I curse you living, and I curse you dying, I curse you standing, and sitting, and lying. I curse the air you breathe, the food that you eat, I curse the earth under your feet. May you suffer the agony of all of your victims before you are permitted to die, and may that be soon!

I am with you, tisiphone.
Yellowknife is a mess right now with all of the extra people. Cots set up in hotel hallways, emergency food being broken out. I would imagine that there are tourists being billeted out to locals.

Thanks for giving me a laugh on a grim day.

And I’m very glad that it came out all right.

Yep, it’s ahhh, interesting.

I can’t go to work tomorrow, the school my kids go to is being used to billet passengers. All the hotels are full, and all the B&B’s, but there’s a list of people offering housing.

My husband works at the Airline Inn, and it looks like they’re housing the crew of the Korean passenger jet. He’s whining about this a little - “…but I’m TERRIBLE at Charades!”

Apparently the single English speaker is liasing for the rest - poor bugger. Ah well, by the time hubby gets to work, they should be in exhausted slumber.

To be brutally honest, what went on here was scary, but entertaining. The EMO guys got to play with all their keen toys, the RCMP got to be efficient, official, and occasionally officious (rat jerk not letting me go HOME), and the news guys got real Hard News to report.

All I’ve been able to do is talk to the hospital about getting on the emergency donor list. We don’t have any facilities for public donation here, we get our usual supply from Vancouver. However, if anything happens in the Yukon, I will be on tap, so to speak, and at least this will mean a little less from elsewhere.

Nobody needs blankets or food, all is covered. So I can’t help there.

Dammit, I’m O neg. I KNOW the Red Cross wants me…

It could be worse–it could be snowing.

:smiley:

Funny you should mention that…there’s snow on the hilltops but none downtown yet.

I swear to God, I love Canada. :slight_smile:

Further little Canadian moments…

When the passengers were finally allowed to leave the jets, some of them were quite traumatized. One young man was in tears. He was met by a SWAT team member in black body armour with a fully automatic weapon…who gave him a hug. :slight_smile:

That’s what I mean. If there were jobs in Victoria… (If I’m emigrating it’s to someplace with a NICE climate, thanks! No Yukon for THIS former Minnesotan.