Friday, July 9, 2010

Red Hill Parkway floods out ... again

The news this week that a second site is now seriously being considered for the new Ti-Cats stadium, on a greenfield no less, is raising serious questions about how committed we are to public transit improvements.   The team's owner, Bob Young, seems not at all to care about this instead favouring a "driveway to driveway" experience -- meaning more traffic gridlock.   And this is also the stadium that will host track and field and a couple of soccer matches during the 2015 Toronto Pan-Am Games.

It's a serious issue now because today the Red Hill Valley Parkway (which runs to the top of the hill where the alternate site is) got flooded out today and had to close for the second time in a week.   Despite tens of millions spent on a storm overflow system to deal with such an event, it simply couldn't cope.

The city's top engineer is now blaming the two time closure on "global warming."   Two hundred year storms in a week?    No ... we're actually used to this kind of rain during the summer.   It's our sewage plant on Woodward that can't cope with it all and causes a two foot high "lake" to back up onto the highway.    And now Mr. Young wants to build a stadium on a far less than ideal site, which could basically destroy the Eramosa Karst across the street.    Has he even spent any time in Hamilton recently and taken a look at our city plan which makes protecting greenlands and sensitive sites a priority?

Fix whatever's causing the road to flood so often, by all means.   That will probably mean a couple more overflow tanks along route.  But for heaven's sake, let's not create an even bigger disaster when 30,000 fans at the stadium will want to flush the toilet all at the same time with the filthy runaway slime running downhill, swamping dozens of cars and trucks along the way.   That will really be good for our public image which is already best summed up with the old Wayne and Shuster joke, "On a clear day, you can see Hamilton."

Stick with the West Harbour which is much more amenable to public transit -- and can better cope with a flood out situation.   Don't eat up prime agricultural lands for the sake of a few greedy football players.   Most cities would have settled on a site and done the expropriations before the bid was submitted and the shovels in the ground the day after award.    We're more than eight months past when we won, and we still haven't figured out where it should be?

It's a no-brainer.    After today's weather, I have to ask where the brains are regarding our future infrastructure.

Vote for this post at Progressive Bloggers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why is the rain water going into sewer system ? Why not the ... Red Hill Creek ??