Brenda A. Craig: Amarillo By Morning

Brenda A. Craig: Amarillo By Morning

Terra Del Fuego

Living in the Hot Zone - Notes from the BC Interior
By Brenda Craig

Central Canada has its killer tornadoes, Atlantic Canada is a hurricane destination and every summer, British Columbia goes to war with fire.

It's late August now and cooler this morning, but the town of Kamloops has more days over 30 degrees than any other place in Canada and by noon it will likely hotter than a jalapeno. A blue-gray haze is laying low in the Thompson Valleys below Kamloops’ iconic desert hills, scorched yellow in the heat. No doubt, a Northern Pacific Rattlesnake or two is lazing in the sagebrush-tufted hills and God help the hiker who steps off the trail and irritates one of those rascals. The pine beetles have sucked the life out of about 50 percent of the pines that splash the hillsides around town -- and it is so dry a fart could start a fire.

All day long, there's the constant whoop-whoop of helicopters carrying water buckets to a fire somewhere, the long moan of big prop air tankers swooping shoulder first and fast down onto the runway at Kamloops Davey Fulton airport to fill up with a fresh load of retardant. It feels like a warzone and it is.

With over 600 fires burning across the province and a monster fire close to burning down the little town of Lillooet in BC Fraser Valley, a sweaty Premier Gordon Campbell appeared on television at the height of the summer's heat wave, begging people to be careful. A tossed cigarette, a tin can or glass bottle can work like a magnifying glass and set the forest ablaze. “Stay out of the back country,” he implored. “You can’t get out if a fire starts, and we can’t get in to save you.”

The province’s minister of Forests, a few weeks ago, got into a ‘heated’ argument when he came across a group of campers ignoring the ban on outdoor fires. Although, who would want to save people who are that dumb? – one might ask.

There’s a new word in the forest fire lexicon – the ‘Urban Interface Fire” meaning, according the BC government website, “the geographical point where the diverse values of the wilderness and urban development meet.” Ungovernmentize that and – housing developments built close to wilderness areas increases the risk of losing life and property.



From my office window, I can see the blackened pines from the great fires of 2003 that gulped through the Interior, burning down houses in Kelowna, and Barriere and McClure. "We've been lucky this year, knock wood," the Kamloopsians say. "Oh ya, we're lucky to have a Fire Centre here."

Not to say there haven’t been any fires. A spark from the wheels of a train passing through town set a small fire in ditch near a Kamloops’ neighbourhood and it took days to snuff it completely.

The smoke is getting thicker as a write. New fires have started overnight – about 30 kilometers from the city. Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop. I can hear the choppers, one after the other. Birddogs, the small planes that guide tankers to hotspots, zing zing overhead. The hum is constantly, the sound of one melding into the sound of the next.

Kamloops semi-arid geography is really quite spectacular – it feels mystical, the soft lines of Mount Paul and Mount Lolo make it feel serene and calm. The light looks almost Tuscan sometimes. Businesses and neighbourhoods have names like Sagebrush Security or Desert Gardens and Sun Rivers.

Officially, Kamloops is about one centimeter shy of being designated as a desert although this year, we might have made it into that category. Less than half the usually amount of rain has fallen. A two-hour thunderstorm a few a days produced not a single drop of rain. All that fell was lightning that sparked a few new fires.

The only thing in town hotter than the weather is a roaring debate over water meters. Kamloops homeowners don’t have them, they pay a flat rate for water use. If people didn’t water their yards like hell on the days the city allows them to, this would be one ‘Brown Town’ and probably even more prone to fires.

In fact, the people of Kamloops uses more water per capital than any other city in Canada. A lot of that water they probably drink. I personally have poured more water through my system than I can possibly explain since I fled Toronto for the sanity of my beloved Western Canada several in 2005.

Who knows if southern Ontario’s tornadoes, Atlantic Canada’s fierce storms and BC’s fires are due to global warming? Did the pine beetle problem go ignored too long, or have we interrupted Mother Nature’s ‘to do list’ by artificially controlling fires in too many places too often. Who can say? There used to be volcanoes and lava flowing through these valleys a few billion years ago. I can just tell you what it is like in the fire zone with a record number of days over 35 degrees, with the smell of smoke in the air and the threat of fire always in the back of your mind. That’s life in the hot zone, that’s Canada’s terra del fuego.

Brenda Craig is a freelance writer and former CBC TV National Reporter who now makes her home in Kamloops, British Columbia. www.brendacraig.ca

Beverly Ann Bullock

We Miss You Everyday, Everyday.

Amarillo By Morning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZlN9ZMgiR8

Note to Canadian Journalists

Interesting article in the New York Times today about Journalists snooping around for jobs with the Obama team, and in some cases succeeding. We have a similar situation, I would argue, in Canadian Journalism. Two of our three network anchors nightly sport order of canada pins, three nationally known journalists have been appointed to the Senate and when it comes to who gets to live at Rideau Hall, well it is simply a question of which TV Diva will be next. I argue it makes us look a little soft around the edges, maybe leads to slower pitches in those scrums and exclusive interviews with the PM. Which side are we on brothers and sisters, which side are we on?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/politics/03reporters.html?th&emc=th

US Airways Pilot said "Brace for Impact"

A US Airways Airbus A340 crashed landed into the chilly waters of New York's Hudson River today -- all 150 souls on board survived the accident in what can be only be described as a miracle. In only seconds the Pilots made razor sharp decisions, managing to avoid nearby buildings and made a floating crash-landing onto the water. In minutes there were rafts, passenger ferries, and marine rescue workers on the scene rescuing passengers as they poured out of the downed plane onto the windgs and stood helpless in the middle of the Hudson.

Consider this a metaphor for the strength of the American people and the apparently hopeless economic collapse that is currently pulling the world economy under water.
The Americans have the power of perseverance. It's a 'we never give in to adversity' nation built on deep reservoirs of passion and undeniable belief in the strength of the individual and a made of steel commitment to tomorrow.

If the Americans can pull people out alive from that disaster, surely can pull out of the economic disaster.