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Canada Earth

Canadian Village Lytton Evacuated as Mayor Says 'the Whole Town is on Fire' (www.cbc.ca) 105

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Residents of a Canadian village which recorded the country's highest ever temperature, 49.6C (121.3F), have been forced to flee by a wildfire. From a report: A small B.C. village that endured the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Canada for days on end this week was engulfed in flames Wednesday night and residents were forced to flee, many without their belongings. Mayor Jan Polderman says he told everyone to leave Lytton, as a fire rapidly spread into the community of about 250 people. He signed the official evacuation order at 6 p.m. PT. "It's dire. The whole town is on fire," Polderman told CBC News. "It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere." He said he told residents to head for the nearby community of Boston Bar, and was on his way there himself. A reception centre has also been set up in Merritt to the east, and other residents have taken shelter in Lillooet to the north. "At the First Nation band office, the fire was a wall about three, four feet high coming up to the fence line. I drove through town and it was just smoke, flames, the wires were down," Polderman said. Video captured by residents rushing out of town show numerous structures on fire in every direction.
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Canadian Village Lytton Evacuated as Mayor Says 'the Whole Town is on Fire' More

Canadian Village Lytton Evacuated as Mayor Says 'the Whole Town is on Fire'

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  • A small price to pay. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday July 01, 2021 @09:16AM (#61540236)

    Death and destruction of a Canadian town, is a small price to pay for us to be able to drive Large Pickup Trucks in our comfy suburban communities. Having large concrete structures that will last much longer than its usable life. Factories creating single use products just so we don't have to worry about storing, cleaning and reusing them. Giving people jobs, while compensated for a middle class life, requires mining and exposing the bodies to chemicals and particles that will take decades off their life and reduce their general quality of life.

    • Spoken like someone who grew up in the luxury enabled by all the things you claim you abhor, having never experienced the lower standard of living that results from not having these things.

      And I don't mean "oh noes i cant get muh disposable fast fashion shirt!" I mean having to waste hours of your waking life every single day on tasks like
      1. Washing reusable containers instead of trashing/recycling them
      2. Washing cloth diapers instead of trashing disposable ones
      3. Waiting on public transit and/or walking th

      • Re: A small price to pay. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian@bixby.gmail@com> on Thursday July 01, 2021 @10:20AM (#61540430)

        Almost nothing on your list is necessitated by living a simpler lower-impact lifestyle. Sorry you've lived in some shitty apartments, but there are low- to no-cost mitigations for most of that.

        • Impact and necessity are in the eye of the beholder.

          One man's gas-guzzling monstrosity is another man's mechanism to get his children and their car seats to swim lessons and back, stock up on groceries, and transport the occasional piece of lumber or drywall for a quick repair.

          Other people are offended entirely by the concept of disposability, no matter the specifics or the actual amount of waste generated relative to the reusable option.

          I had an otherwise intelligent friend who worked in tech but didn't ow

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            We here in the Pacific Northwest just spent a week dancing your tune, against our will. I suppose the whole world is going to be your unwilling puppet over the next century.

            • Ah...something bad happens at the same time I tell you something you don't agree with...therefor the bad thing that happened is now my fault ("dancing to your tune").

              Not a real conversation.

              Here's some food for thought: poverty, both relative and absolute, invariably entails more environmentally harmful practices en masse than prosperity.

              Having the lights reliably come on when I flip a switch means I don't need to burn kerosene to light my house.

              Being able to make enough money and not wasting it on green ta

            • Speak for yourself. I live in Vancouver, and have lived not far from Lytton (which is now gone by the way). I understand that we have to do something about carbon, but I don't need or want your sanctimonious bullshit speaking for me. I'd rather have rational thought and practical solutions (which doesn't include trying to force people to ride bikes or walk (and this place is NOT Amsterdam). Yes, Rightwingnutjob is a nutter, but half of what he says is true. The radical left do things that are absolutely mad

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by cusco ( 717999 )

                Yeah, they're not going to be able to blame us for everything much longer, it's going to be their own damn fault. (Not that this will stop them, of course...)

                The longer we wait to make Rightwingnutjob drive something smaller than a Lincoln Navigator the nastier will be the repercussions, and the more drastic will be the rule change. We can still use the carrot, but it's not going to be long before the stick becomes necessary.

                Hard core left and hard core right are both full of sanctimonious annoying idiots

                • The longer we wait to make Rightwingnutjob drive something smaller than a Lincoln Navigator the nastier will be the repercussions, and the more drastic will be the rule change. , but it's not going to be long before the stick becomes necessary.

                  I'm glad you have such high esteem for yourself and your kind that you believe you are ordained by God and Nature to tell other people how to behave, what car they are or are not allowed to purchase and drive, and generally exert influence on their lives.

                  On the other hand, you seem to believe that that self-esteem is actually an objective metric that permits you to try to exercise control over other human beings.

                  That's not such a good thing. And historically, it's the stuff atrocities are made from: I know

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by cusco ( 717999 )

                    Gods, why are Libertardians utterly unable to comprehend their responsibility to society is reciprocal to society's responsibility to them? I suppose if that weren't they case they would have to change religions.

                    You're not allowed to crap on the sidewalk, and in return the rest of us don't crap on your porch. Society has recognized the danger of continued excessive use of fossil fuels, and like it or not at some point you're going to have to go along.

                    • Society has also recognized the benefit of mechanization and easily transportable and storable liquid fuels.

                      An honest conversation would balance the costs (and uncertainties in the costs) against the benefits of hydrocarbon fuels and their putative alternatives.

                      This conversation has not taken place. Instead, as per my original comment, we have:

                      1. A single-minded focus on the catastrophized worst-case downsides.

                      2. Abject ignorance about and/or downright comical denial of the benefits.

                      3. Magical thinking and/

                    • Re: (Score:3)

                      by cusco ( 717999 )

                      Oh, good grief, don't pretend that the ideal world imagined by Mary Treehugger is anything like the real world proposals being put forward by actual people working in the field. I know confirmation bias is pleasant and all, but pretending that everyone concerned with the issue are "self-flagellating clerics" is dishonest at best.

                      BTW, Harbor Air here in Seattle is electrifying their fleet right now, for about the same cost as the regularly scheduled engine rebuild they would have to do anyway, and they seem

                    • Saying puddle jumpers are sometimes worth electrifying therefore get ready to book you transcontinental electric flight is like saying that medical school and law school graduates have high incomes therefore we should hand out MDs and JDs at every community college. Few things scale. Computers were one of them, and spectacularly so, and it's confused generations into thinking everything does.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by cusco ( 717999 )

                      That's a pretty crappy straw man, you need to use more twine before it falls apart.

                    • The difference between much of my trashtalk and some of yours is that I usually try to include an argument along with my insults (if any). You included none in your comment. This is evidence of a fake conversation as opposed to a real one. It takes me back to the mid 1990s when my friends and I discovered AOL instant messages and thought it was the height of sophistication to lob yo mama jokes at eachother through the aether.

          • "I had an otherwise intelligent friend who worked in tech but didn't own a microwave on the grounds that it made cooking too easy or a cellphone on the grounds that it made coordinated planning of meetups less necessary, and therefor both were a moral hazard and a mental crutch that dulled the mind."

            Sounds like the kind of douche bag you would have as a friend.

        • Nah he hasn't lived in an apartment, he's just sort of mushed together every anti urban "augment" he could dredge up from the stupidest parts of the internet.

          It's amazing how many people I've had here tell me with a straight face that, say, London doesn't exist because logic.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        I'll give you #2, #13, and #16.

        #7 conflicts with #5. Do you have a vehicle or not?

        The rest are easily managed or have advantages you haven't mentioned, such as eliminating the need to mow your lawn and eliminating the noise of your neighbors mowing theirs (see #6).

        Also you forget that suburban life is subsidized by downtown areas [streetsblog.org]! Not to mention the fact that gasoline is also subsidized [taxfoundation.org]. How does it feel to require government assistance (redistribution of wealth) to afford your home in the suburbs?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Oh you poor tortured soul, having to do dishes (put them in the dishwasher) and laundry (in the washing machine). God, what next, sweeping the floors? If you can't get a weeks groceries into a Toyota sedan, your family must weigh about 2 tons (each).

        You do not need a 4 wheel drive off-road vehicle to navigate in suburbia, we have paved roads and everything. Also note that many of those pristine "tough" vehicles you see in the truck and SUV commercials would be reduced to scrap metal within a year if actuall

      • Just how fat are you? I mean your complaints look like a wishlist of someone who wants to move as little as possible, almost like you have a fear of exercise.

    • You forgot the dozens of container ships, every week, each one of which pollutes as much as 50,000 cars. Those container ships are caused by things like Walmart, Amazon, and the use of plastic. And all the big-box stores. That's before you get into the pollution caused by airliners on trips of less than 500 miles. That should be outlawed. Less than 500 miles, drive it. Much cheaper and less polluting.

      And don't even get me started on the suburban cowboys having to act all macho and drive a "big rig" pickup t

      • Nope.

        The "50,000" cars thing is a number without context so it sounds big and bad if you don't think about it much. Container ships are frankly unimaginably huge. I don't know if your number is correct. Let's say it is. Thing is they carry as much as 25,000 18 wheelers, vehicles that are much more polluting than two cars.

        I ran the numbers a while back. Turns out it takes more carbon to ship a washing machine from the depot to my house than it does to ship it by container from China to England. I had just bo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        You forgot the dozens of container ships, every week, each one of which pollutes as much as 50,000 cars.

        We had a solution [wikipedia.org] for that once.

        • And where do you store its waste?

          Replacing one problem with another problem, that is not called a solution. That is called plain stupidity.

      • dozens of container ships, every week, each one of which pollutes as much as 50,000 cars.
        The pollution we talk about in this case is sulfur, soot and other "dirt", not CO2.

    • Death and destruction of a Canadian town, is a small price to pay for us to be able to drive Large Pickup Trucks in our comfy suburban communities. Having large concrete structures that will last much longer than its usable life. Factories creating single use products just so we don't have to worry about storing, cleaning and reusing them. Giving people jobs, while compensated for a middle class life, requires mining and exposing the bodies to chemicals and particles that will take decades off their life and reduce their general quality of life.

      It turns out that preening and emoting like that isn't getting the job done. Perhaps we need to get some technological solution in place, like sequestering carbon and building nuclear plants.

    • see here [youtube.com]. The main problem, 70% of it, is industrial pollution that could easily be fixed with minimal cost. The various polluting industries spend millions making you think it's primarily an individual problem because they don't want even that minimal cost cutting into this quarter's profits.

      What's needed is wide ranging government action to do 2 things:

      1. Build the renewables that private companies can't or won't. (e.g. infrastructure)

      2. Force factories to be clean and do it globally with trea

  • Now they can record... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Thursday July 01, 2021 @09:18AM (#61540248) Homepage Journal
    Now they can record an even higher temperature.

  • Had to clean my glasses, at first glance It thought it read "Canadian Village Lytton Executed"....

  • You could almost poach fish by setting it outside there! Holy cow.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      People in BC have been cooking eggs by putting them in a frying pan sitting on the asphalt street.

  • Doing the right thing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) on Thursday July 01, 2021 @10:36AM (#61540464)

    Lytton is brutally hot at the best of times. I live just down the road in Kamloops where the weather this last week has been just plain nuts. There's only one fire in the vicinity but it's a big one (Sparks Lake) and the town is looking all smoky and apocalyptic.

    Since every forest fire these days seems to be just this side of an explosion I wonder if the Forestry people need to rethink how they do these things, since their present approach doesn't seem to work.

    ...laura

    • In Lytton it got so hot the helicopters couldn't fly, then the wind shifted straight towards the town. It was the perfect storm. I'm in Boston Bar, so I hope the wind doesn't shift again.

    • since their present approach doesn't seem to work.

      The main problem is it is already so hot and dry and there's so much vegetation from the decades of "must stop all fires ASAP" that it's far too dangerous to do anything about it in the forests. They're just going to have to burn catastrophically, and then be handled better after they grow back.

      Saving people and property from this is going to be about fire breaks and building codes to make houses less flammable when it reaches those fire breaks.

      • There's that goat story awhile back.

        • That works once the overgrowth is cleared by a fire. There's too much dead material that the goats won't eat, and it's too dry for bacteria and fungi to break the dead material down.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        In California they're getting herds of goats to eat the underbrush. Not sure how that's going.

        • That works once a fire has cleared the overgrowth. The goats don't eat the dead stuff, and it's too dry for bacteria or fungi to break it down.

          Also, we're talking about incredibly enormous areas of lands. There's not enough goats.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        What? The problem lately is warm wet springs causing all types of fast growing undergrowth which then dries out. Most every year now there is a new fresh layer of dry underbrush, even where a fire was last year if it was a quick fire ( ponderosa pine are quite fire resistant). There's also large areas where the Pine beetle has killed all the lodgepole pine too, caused by the lack of -40 winters. Where I live in the rain forest, the Western Red Cedars are also all dying, shit a Redwood down the road died ove

        • The problem lately is warm wet springs causing all types of fast growing undergrowth which then dries out.

          And in many forests, that gets cleared by fire. Since we've been stopping all fires, that undergrowth builds up year after year, decade after decade, and you get giant piles of tinder that burn incredibly hot.

          You can't do a controlled burn of that environment, because the fire is going to be catastrophic no matter how it starts.

          So now we have to wait for catastrophe and then do better after the forest grows back.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      Same problem in Australia.
      Between the lefty green activists saying no touchy mother Gaia and a reduction of hazard burns, you eventually get fuel loads that create monster fires that can be so hot as to sterilise soil.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Here it is warm wet springs causing lots of under growth most every year. That undergrowth grows quick and then dies and drys out.

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