PHOTO: Residents of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, evacuating by the only highway out, as a wildfire approached the town. August 2023.
A mass evacuation has been taking place in Yellowknife, NWT, Canada over the past several days, with most of the town’s 20,000 residents leaving by plane or vehicle. As of Sunday, August 20, the fire was within about 9 miles of the isolated Canadian territorial capital.
The news media seems to have lost interest in Yellowknife since Sunday, so I’m not able to provide a Tuesday morning update.
From an article last week by reporter Daniel Otis for CTV Network:
With two loved ones at Yellowknife’s only hospital, McLeod has a good reason to stay nearby: his wife is a nurse with a background in emergency care while his mother is a patient expecting to be evacuated by air on Friday. “They’re under a code green, which basically means all medical staff have to stay until patients are out,” McLeod, who grew up in Yellowknife, said. “Firefighting teams are still in Yellowknife and if something happens to one of them while they’re trying to protect the city, they are going to need medical care…”
In today’s editorial, we will touch again on the topic of medical care, in emergencies, and government spending.
As discussed yesterday in Part Four, the Pagosa Springs Medical Center (PSMC), in 2021, purchased equipment to generate medical oxygen, in the midst of the COVID crisis… but did not know, at the time, that a small, 450-square-foot building to house the equipment would be outrageously expensive.
I’m going to repeat some of the information shared in Part Four.
PSMC is now applying for a 50/50 matching grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs Energy/Mineral Impact Assistance Fund, to help pay for the building. Other grants may be available to help pay for the building.
Here’s CEO Dr. Rhonda Webb, addressing the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners on August 15:
“The building is very specialized; the price per square foot is tremendous. It’s only about 420 square feet, but it’s very specialized, because there’s a lot that goes into creating your own oxygen.”
Very specialized. And very expensive.
The tax-supported hospital had determined, back in 2019, that — during a community emergency — local residents surviving with the assistance of medical oxygen would likely approach PSMC, expecting to have their tanks refilled.
If… for example… a wildfire or weather event were to close Highway 160?
For how many days would the highway be closed? A week? Two weeks? It seems to me (off the top of my head) that an inexpensive storage building and a stockpile of oxygen tanks would be able to handle a temporary highway closure.
But this ‘oxygen generation’ equipment and building is not necessarily (it seems to me) designed to serve local citizens who will want their oxygen tanks filled in a weather emergency — but rather to serve PSMC during the next ‘respiratory disease’ pandemic; that is, to serve PSMC itself during a medical emergency that might last months, or maybe years.
During the COVID crisis, the hospital was challenged by oxygen availability, and by the inability to transfer patients to larger hospitals where oxygen was more readily available. Dr. Webb stated that, at one point, the hospital was monitoring its oxygen supply on an hourly basis. So PSMC purchased oxygen generation equipment in 2021
When PSMC solicited bids for the specialized 450-square-foot building to house the equipment, the only bid — from a Front Range construction company — came in at over $900,000. About $2,000 per square foot.
The bid price came as a shock, needless to say.
But should we be surprised at the high price?
Last Saturday, I listened to a podcast on the StrongTown.org website… commentary from Abby Newsham, an urban design and planning consultant in Kansas City, and Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn, a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience with infrastructure projects. They were reacting to an article by reporter Aaron Gordon, posted on VICE.com
From the Strong Towns website:
A recent VICE article shares the conclusions of a report published by an NYU research group. The research, led by Alon Levy, spans some 15 years and demonstrates the extent to which transit projects in the U.S. are inflated, compared to other countries around the world — and what we can do about it.
For instance, the cost of constructing a subway in New York is double what it costs in Tokyo and 10 times what it costs in Paris. The research found New York to be the most expensive place to build transit in the world, and the lack of efficiency means we get less transit for more money, and we have a lot of public sector debt…
The NYC research group was looking specifically at the outrageous cost of transportation projects in America, but Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn expanded on the question in the podcast. Because it’s not just transportation infrastructure that has been driving our communities ever more deeply into debt. The problem relates to pretty much any type of government-funded infrastructure: schools, courthouses, offices, roads, bridges, water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants…
Disclosure: I currently serve on the Board of Directors for Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) but I’m not speaking for the Board here, but only sharing my own opinions.
PAWSD recently approved a contract for a new water treatment plant on Snowball Road, to replace the aging treatment plant there. The cost of the plant will be more than $40 million. Some of that cost will be paid for via taxes, but most will ultimately come from water customer fees. (Those potential fees will be discussed this Thursday at the 5pm PAWSD Board meeting.)
Some thoughts from Chuck Marohn, in reference to the term “Industrial Complex” — that is, the industries that build our public infrastructure projects:
“Here’s what that term means to me. It means a system that is focused on one thing, and doesn’t really care about another thing.
“And the one thing we’re focused on, in the case of infrastructure, is ‘spending money’. We are really focused on doing projects, building more stuff, and we don’t really care, at all… about the cost. It’s really a very low priority for us, how much things cost. And so what happens over time — over decades, over generations, of having this focus, this obsession — we have evolved systems that is focused on, ‘How do we deliver big projects?’ ‘How do we do big things?’ as opposed to, ‘How do we do things cost-effectively?’
“How do we do things that make some sense, financially? I have seen this over and over and over again, and this is the essence of why we have Strong Towns as an organization, and as a movement.
“For years, I worked on projects that — financially — were insane. And they were obviously insane…”
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.