Quote:
Originally Posted by fusili
It sucked, but hey, it was a freak windstorm, so I don't blame Calgary Transit.
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We seem to have "freak" things happen on a very, very regular basis in this city. If CT or the City is incapable of having good contingency plans for things that happen at least several times per year, someone is dropping the ball. I don't give 2 shits what their excuse is anymore - the plain fact is that trains are blocked from downtown on a frequent enough basis. Windstorms at least twice that I can remember off the top of my head, suicides, vehicle collisions, frozen switches, etc, etc, etc.
Have an emergency plan for that, and make damned sure it works. The nature of the emergency is irrelevant - "trains can't go down 7th" is what you call it. And it happens all the time. I didn't get stuck in the chaos yesterday but I can only imagine the scene of 1000+ people standing around for an hour. Lucky it wasn't -20 outside. At the very least someone should have a way of notifying commuters that the C-Train is for all intents and purposes not working (morning rush is probably 95% core commuters). I bet plenty of people would have stayed home if they knew the chaos underway, which would also help mitigate the problem with shuttles, etc. I didn't know anything was wrong downtown until I started getting emails from cow-orkers.
I guess this is more reason to have underground lines in the downtown core (still no plans for what will end up on 7th Ave, but oh well). And 3rd St W station is STILL closed as of this morning - I guess it takes 2 full days to sweep up some glass.
Incidentally, I'm remembering another "freak windstorm" a couple (ish?) years back where construction debris was flying everywhere, and a little girl got crushed. The public outcry was huge, the construction industry smartened up and spent millions to ensure it doesn't happen again. I have yet to hear of a single construction site incident from Sunday. Granted things are a lot slower today, but still. Obviously it's possible to plan for this sort of thing. No one was standing around back then saying "eh, it was just a freak windstorm, there's nothing that can be done".
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