OTTAWA – Ontario’s Niagara Region has declared a state of emergency as it prepares to welcome up to a million visitors for the solar eclipse in early April. The total solar eclipse on April 8 will be the first to touch the province since 1979, and Niagara Falls was declared by National Geographic to be one of the best places to see it. The city is in the path of totality, where the moon will entirely block the suns rays for a few minutes. A view of Niagara Falls, Ont. is shown on Friday, March 29, 2024 in a photo […]
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
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.