Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Like most major cities, it was built on a river. Two rivers, actually, the Bow and the Elbow.
The rivers are pretty lazy, not shipping rivers or anything anymore. The Elbow is really slow through the city, so we tempt Neptune yearly and get drunk floating down the river. Very few people die!
Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Like most major cities, it was built on a river. Two rivers, actually, the Bow and the Elbow.
The rivers are pretty lazy, not shipping rivers or anything anymore. The Elbow is really slow through the city, so we tempt Neptune yearly and get drunk floating down the river. Very few people die!
In 2016, people started getting sick on the Elbow, and some quick sampling revealed troubling amounts of fecal coliform in the water. The river was full of poops and people getting it in their mouth and eyes were getting diseases associated with poo rivers. Weird for city fairly well known for good water quality and sitting at the foot of the Rockies getting all that good, healthy snow run-off.
Four years later, 2020, today, a chunk of the Elbow is still mad dookie water. The signs are still up to avoid the doodies with your mouth and other holes because *nobody knows where the shit is coming from*.
That's not a huge mystery, and it's not an important river, and nobody has died, but the idea that there is mad coilers leeching into a river in the fourth biggest city in a G8 country and we can't figure out why always amused me. Like, we split the atom, we put a man on the moon, we can point rays at the body and see tumours growing, and a million other miracles regularly, but we still can't adequately deal with our dumps sometimes. Sometimes the brown river remains brown and dangerous because finding the poop is beyond our capacity millions of years since the species first evolved. Amazing.
Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Like most major cities, it was built on a river. Two rivers, actually, the Bow and the Elbow.
The rivers are pretty lazy, not shipping rivers or anything anymore. The Elbow is really slow through the city, so we tempt Neptune yearly and get drunk floating down the river. Very few people die!
In 2016, people started getting sick on the Elbow, and some quick sampling revealed troubling amounts of fecal coliform in the water. The river was full of poops and people getting it in their mouth and eyes were getting diseases associated with poo rivers. Weird for city fairly well known for good water quality and sitting at the foot of the Rockies getting all that good, healthy snow run-off.
Four years later, 2020, today, a chunk of the Elbow is still mad dookie water. The signs are still up to avoid the doodies with your mouth and other holes because *nobody knows where the shit is coming from*.
That's not a huge mystery, and it's not an important river, and nobody has died, but the idea that there is mad coilers leeching into a river in the fourth biggest city in a G8 country and we can't figure out why always amused me. Like, we split the atom, we put a man on the moon, we can point rays at the body and see tumours growing, and a million other miracles regularly, but we still can't adequately deal with our dumps sometimes. Sometimes the brown river remains brown and dangerous because finding the poop is beyond our capacity millions of years since the species first evolved. Amazing.