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There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

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Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#231

Post by JPKab »

lhorie wrote: post #100

For just a bit of context/anecdata, I'm talking to my brother who lives in Vancouver and he wasn't even aware this was a problem. The road closure[0] on hwy 1 near Abbotsford/Chilliwack is a good one hour drive away from Vancouver core[1]. So while it sounds noteworthy for an entire city be technically flooded in, unless you were driving to the boonies, you're probably not actually impacted in any meaningful way. He…

Wait a minute now:

I've been to Vancouver before, but I"m completely ignorant about the supply chain there.

We're talking about a metropolis of 2.5 million people. What's the impact on food supplies, fuel, etc? Very curious. Is it primarily coming up from the US???

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#232

Post by AutumnCurtain »

cronix wrote: post #225
amatecha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Vancouver - my coworkers and family were very aware of this, watching footage online and exclaiming at the brutal nature of the weather and landslides we experienced yesterday. Never seen this many roads closed in BC in my nearly 4 decades living here.

The whole upper pacific coastline is experiencing it. There is a lot of flooding along the Oregon coast as well with cars/trailers floating away and evacuations. Intense rains for days at a time. I mean we get a lot of rain here, but this has been pretty crazy and constant.

Let's hope it migrates further south and relieves some of the California drought. Any meteorologists have a sense of the weather patterns at play here?

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#233

Post by CydeWeys »

cf100clunk wrote: post #226
justsid wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shortage is the other way. The rest of BC gets most of its produce from the lower mainland. I live in Kelowna (funny to see a local news site on here), and our stores have basically no produce because we can’t get anything from the lower mainland. Fun times.

Conversely, the outward flow of Okanagan wine products will be sharply affected. For example, the market for Okanagan ice wine in Asia is huge. Also, when the Lower Mainland growing season is done, the produce shipped from Chile and Peru comes into Vancouver's ports and goes out across western Canada and the North.

At least ice wine is shelf stable for years, right? It's not like it's gonna go bad; it'll just be a little bit of a delay until it can be sold.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#234

Post by cf100clunk »

Scoundreller wrote: post #188
cf100clunk wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need a special VHF radio for that kind of traffic tracking on Forest Service Roads in BC, and there are specific usage patterns you must follow: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/natural-resource... A CB radio doesn't help much with that, but it is just another means of possibly getting contact with others.

Ahhh, I remember it being possible on one of the Baofeng’s that can do almost anything. Transmitting may require licensing, but listening should be fine.

That's an excellent point - using the channel maps at the site I linked to above, there is nothing to stop someone with a scanner keeping informed of FSR traffic.

Just one other point: on an FSR an average person's general sense of traffic "right of way" is generally wrong and can result in some terrible accidents far from help. To wit: the bus crash involving UBC students outside Bamfield.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#235

Post by fragmede »

lhorie wrote: post #121
skrebbel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised there's no shortages yet because trucks can't get to the city. Or does Vancouver import most non-regional goods from the US (and not the rest of Canada) anyway?

Keep in mind that Vancouver is a port city, and the road closures did not affect roads to the US so for the vast majority of the people in the city, the impact is likely minimum. I'd be more worried about disruptions for municipalities like Hope, which are only connected to Vancouver by a handful of roads (the next major hub in the other direction would be Calgary, which is... well, pretty far away).

> road closures did not affect roads to the US

The storm that hit which caused the flooding which closed the roads also hit the Vancouver-adjacent parts of the US, so some of those are closed as well.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#236

Post by jacquesm »

lhorie wrote: post #201
jacquesm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The boonies", does that include Calgary? There is quite a bit of road traffic between Vancouver and Calgary via Kamloops and Banff. Or did you mean just West of the Rockies?

Sorry, "boonies" might have been a bit of a callous choice of words. Reading more about it, it sounds like the folks at Abbotsford, Hope and surrounding areas are having a pretty lousy time right now.

To me the 'boonies' in Canada is west of Timmins, East of Wawa and North of Desbarats in Ontario, and anything North of Kamloops in BC. The roads in BC are very critical infrastructure, there aren't that many of them to begin with and there are a lot of choke points on the downslopes of mountain ranges where you have to pass through, unfortunately it looks as though that's where the road outages are.

Canada is an amazing country scenery wise, but it is also a very thin veneer of civilization on top of a very rugged countryside and it doesn't take much to turn it from workable into unconnected islands overnight. Let's hope that they manage to keep the power running and some way to keep those communities supplied because with winter on the way that can get ugly really quickly.

Canadians are usually pretty self sufficient but without roads I'm not sure how that would work.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#237

Post by rrix2 »

arcticbull wrote: post #169
cbhl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Vancouver a port city? I imagine there'd be more truck shipments out, eastwards towards the rest of Canada.

They should be able to continue, albeit delayed, via the US. Should be possible to head south into Washington State and re-enter Canada at Oroville-Osoyoos.

sure, they just have to hope the north cascades highway is open when the snow-levels are already lowering from these storms. Usually that highway is closed during the winter season

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#238

Post by soperj »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #128
skrebbel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised there's no shortages yet because trucks can't get to the city. Or does Vancouver import most non-regional goods from the US (and not the rest of Canada) anyway?

Gas comes through pipeline from refineries in Washington, so that should be largely unaffected. Lots of produce does come from the Fraser Valley which is impacted, but also North/South links to the USA (ie. we get heaps of produce from California). I assume there's a fair amount of food that is delivered from the port, as a lot of food packaging warehouses are near the port. Most trade in Canada is North/South aligne…

No it doesn't. Vast majority of the gas is through Trans Mountain from Alberta. Also, more than half of the oil that gets refined in Washington comes from an arm of the Trans-mountain pipeline, so also Alberta. 100% of the fuel used at the Vancouver airport also comes through trans-mountain.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#239

Post by Scoundreller »

seryoiupfurds wrote: post #219
Scoundreller wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CP mainline that washed out will take a while to fix, but the other mainline, CN, doesn’t seem to have taken any serious damage. They’ll definitely have some cleanup somewhere, but that happens after every storm. I hope the two have some mutual aid agreement to bypass over each others tracks.

As far as I understand it, they already share their tracks in routine service, using one westbound and the other eastbound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-track_railway#Direction... > A similar example exists in the Fraser Canyon in British Columbia, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific each own a single track line - often on either side of the river. The companies have a joint arrangement where they share re…

“Competitors” sharing networks is such a Canadian tradition.

Just like 2 of our 3 big cellular companies (Bell and Telus) sharing a single network.

Re: There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada

#240

Post by fragmede »

porkloin wrote: post #88
javajosh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That garmin is a cool toy, but pricey ($400 for the device plus $50/mo for unlimited text service). What does your family member do that they have one? It seems like the kind of thing a park ranger would have, or that someone might rent before going on a long hike in a remote area.

I live in a very rural area of the US, so I probably have an over-representative sample, but mostly folks I know who own one (myself included) view it at as an essential piece of backcountry safety equipment. If you spend 1 or 2 weekends per month in areas without cell signal (even recreationally, as is my case), it quickly becomes worthwhile even just as a means of emergency communication for people to contact _you_…

How many of those people have a PS5 ($400+, depending on edition), PS4 ($400 at launch) or some flavor of Xbox ($400 or so, depending on edition). I have friends who own multiple game consoles and don't consider it unrestrained opulence that owning a Garmin Inreach supposedly represents.
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