On May 3rd, Sarah Rosen from the Strathcona Regional District came to the Pioneer Room at Mansons Hall to talk about emergency preparedness… and there were about eight people in the room. As Sarah herself said, the biggest emergency preparedness risk on the island might just be that so few of us are thinking about it.
[I’ll admit that I’ve been procrastinating — not getting around to producing this story — and it might be because the subject is a little uncomfortable when you know that you yourself are not prepared. But avoidance and procrastination are exactly the problems that Sarah came to address, and she says being prepared might not be as daunting as you think.]
The two 12-hour power outages on May 24 and June 7 were part of BC Hydro’s ongoing Jervis Inlet and Agamemnon Channel Power Line Replacement Project. Crews took advantage of this to replace poles and aging equipment, as well as trim trees that were too close to power lines on Cortes Island.
Precision Tree Service was brought in to trim trees. The company is based in Comox, and they worked two 16-hour days, leaving home at 6 a.m. and returning at about 10 p.m. Their work is now complete.
BC Hydro crews will continue to replace poles and aging equipment this week. Some residences have received outage notices specific to their street/area. A worklist copied from the BC Hydro planned outage map follows below.
Humanity’s attempted dominance over nature is becoming a problem—attempted because we think that we are in control whereas, in fact, we are disturbing natural ecologies to such an extent that we are creating biological and biophysical systems that will be hostile to our survival as a civilization and as a species.
This illusion of control and its consequences have been the concern of Daniel Lim, the principal of a consulting firm that specializes in the “advance of social justice through nature-based whole systems change.” Lim is not worried so much about biological systems as sociological ones, and how some cultures rise to such power that they dominate and obliterate smaller ones. History is replete with examples of these “supremacy cultures” and the social injustices that they create as a result of exercising their power and influence. But what is the alternative?
By Isaac Phan Nay, The Tyee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada’s long-awaited and much-delayed artificial intelligence strategy on Thursday, outlining how his government plans to adopt and control the powerful technology.
The strategy signals the government’s support for large-scale AI adoption. The plan includes a $500-million fund to invest in Canadian AI companies and a commitment to support construction of data centres that will bring at least a combined 850 megawatts of compute capacity by 2030.
After serving at the Quadra Island Medical Clinic for eight years, Dr Steve Hughes will soon be retiring. That puts the island in a difficult spot and inn this morning’s interview Marc Doll, Chair of the Quadra Island Foundation, explains how his organization and the clinic have teamed and raised more than $50,000 towards finding Hughes replacement.
Marc Doll: “Dr. Hughes, who I believe is the doctor for several people on Cortes as well, is retiring. He’s stretched out his retirement as far as he can. Come September, he will be doing the official retirement, which puts that clinic, which is anchored by a doctor, in a stressful position.”
“The Quadra Island Health Society, which was formed last time a doctor left that clinic, has been searching for a doctor for some time now, and it’s been a rough rough ride. It’s hard to find doctors willing to come to specialized clinics in rural settings. So they decided, as a board, to reach out to a professional healthcare recruiter. That comes with a pretty hefty price tag, at least from my perspective, and the decision was to go to the community to find the funds to hire a recruiter to bring a doctor, to the island to keep that clinic open.”
