The Albertan candidate brought to the ground the same day Ft. Mac burned to the ground – coincidence? I think not.
Northern Piper – re. that steep bridge thread/post that I can only vaguely remember – found a brand new bouncing baby road for you: Photobucket | Make your memories fun!
Well, that looks… exciting.
Skiing ended on the first, so 2nd and 3rd I was scouting for new ski terrain for next winter. Got lucky with this find.
It does appear as if the evacuation of Fort McMurray has been performed quite well, given how quickly it had to happen.
It’s awful, but houses and things can be replaced. People, not so much.
How many water bombers with crews etc. can you get for an F-35?
For the flyaway cost, three planes.
A water bomber usually has a crew of two, not one, so I’m not sure how you compare that.
To be fair, yesterday emergency crews were saying that the skies above the fire pretty much had all of the aircraft they could handle, so more water bombers may not be the answer.
To be fairer, Canada has no F-35s to sell.
It is fascinating to note this is happening not long after the Province of Alberta chose to significantly reduce its firefighting budget. I don’t think that has any effect on this - it was literally weeks ago, far too recently to have any effect on this - but it raises the interesting problem of how you fund stuff like this.
A country’s level of preparedness for emergencies is a tough bet to make. You must balance the ability to respond to likely levels of disaster with fiscal realities, based on a reasonable projection of what could possibly happen. This applies to any sort of contingency one might think of - war, fire, flood, plaque, snowstorms. If Alberta or Canada were to fund forest-fire-fighting capacities to the absolute theoretical limit of what forest fires were capable of, there would be scarecely any money left over for anything else. Conversely, if we are completely unprepared, fires would consume huge swaths of the country unopposed. So it is arguable that a wildfire of this ferocity is one Canada or Alberta cannot, practically speaking, always be prepared for.
This problem can actually be seen in a number of small municipalities where - this is literally true - they are being bankrupted by their own fire department. The cost of maintaining a fire department never shrinks, but the need for fire departments in their traditional capacity of extinguishing house fires is actually much reduced today (people smoke less and are generally more careful about such things.) So in little towns they’re being busted by having fire prevention capabilities they probably wouldn’t need in two hundred years.
It’s a difficult thing to budget for because such things are inherently unpredictable. A budget based on fires, floods, etc. as they cost you over the last 15 years may be insanely high or insanely low for 2016 if you have no floods at all, or have the flood of the century.
You’re right, it had no effect on this, because cuts to the tanker contract wre not going into effect until this coming September.
Perhaps we should look instead to the FOUR YEARS of inaction by the previous government and the current one after being warned of the risk of catastrophic fires in the area. It’s not like they did not know this was a possibility.
Better yet. Let’s leave politics out of it entirely.
In the case of provincial firefighting, a budget amount is simply a line item - a guestimate as to the cost for the year. It’s not like when the amount is reached, the crews just pack up and go home. The province overspends the budgeted amount for the year.
Not when it comes to staffing or capital equipment purchases. These things don’t change after the budget is set, typically. You can’t buy 2 new ladder trucks when a large apartment complex starts to burn.
When I moved to my present place, I called up my home insurer to arrange for coverage. I was asked how far I was from the closest hydrant. They were not happy with my “two or three kilometers,” so I sent them a copy of the newspaper from a couple of days prior. Yup, the front page’s leading photo was a water bomber drop on a truck at the end of my street. Of course they still didn’t like the “two or three kilometers,” but at least they had a chuckle.
Je ne comprends pas.
Something along the lines of this.
Exactement.
nm
Muffin, how is the putting the address on your census this year? Better than in 2011?
Also, how is the fire situation there? My old boss at MNR used to say “May is Fire Flap Month!”
Military purchases are made by the federal government. Fire bombers tend to be provincial assets. No direct linkage.
Census? What census? That requires a secure access code that they mail to me by Canada Post. Canada Post is not too enthusiastic about that. I’ll send a note to that Deepak guy about this.
Yesterday a couple of waterbombers and forty firefighters dealt with a major brush fire a few kilometers upstream at Stanley before any homes were lost. Drunk Wally next door had a fellow log out part of his property over the winter, and he seems to have gone off the bottle, so the fuel load in the neighbourhood has been lessened a bit, but even then, I’m glad that TBay is a water bomber base.