Whenever it gets hot out, I remember a song I liked. It was by the Lovin鈥� Spoonful and called Summer in the City.
I particularly liked the lines: 鈥淒oesn鈥檛 seem to be a shadow in the city, all around people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.鈥�
If you try to walk barefoot on the sidewalk or road you can burn your feet, but being on the grass is no problem.
There is a little used aspect of geology and geography. You could call it urban or human geology. It should be used more because what humans do, and build, has a big impact on things. Building a city out of glass, steel, concrete and asphalt is going to make it hotter in the summer and colder in the winter than the natural landscape. It also creates a bigger run-off when it rains and causes more wind and snow in winter. Personally, I think we should consider this information with everything humans build or do because it does affect things.
Here is an example: during the Second World War, cities all over Europe were turning underground train stations into bomb shelters and built shelters for large buildings and neighbourhoods. In the North, the Canadians and Americans built the Alaska highway, the Canol Pipeline and several airstrips, including one at sawmill bay at Great Bear Lake.
Mines with infrastructure, such as airstrips, housing and potential underground storage, are told to clean up everything. But at the same time, the government is talking about building infrastructure for the North. So why don鈥檛 they use what is already here?
In Yellowknife, we had the Giant, Con, Rycon, Negus and Akaitcho mines, plus just outside of town the Gold Lake and Crestaurum mines. So, there are lots of shafts and portals to the underground that we could put to use.
Every year, we spend a lot of energy and money keeping things cold or frozen with freezers located inside of heated buildings. Yet, if you go down into the ground or rock a little, there is a permafrost layer. At the old Burns meat plant, they had an addit into the permafrost layer which they used for cold storage. So, we could tap into the underground workings in the permafrost layer to provide cold and freezing air. Then when one goes deeper into the Earth鈥檚 crust, it gets warmer. So, we could tap into the geothermal heat.
Plus, we have an enormous number of underground spaces we could use for storage. You could shelter the entire population of Yellowknife underground in case of wildfires in summer or a major power outage in winter. I know some people don鈥檛 like the idea, but we should use the resources and infrastructure we have. By the same token, there is still a lot of gold in the rocks in the Yellowknife area and that should be mined.
It has always baffled me that as a northern country, we haven鈥檛 really figured out yet how to live in the North comfortably and how to use our renewable and non-renewable resources and assets more efficiently. Where is the 黑料吃瓜网 library and research centre? A place where we take what we already know and do research to discover better and less expensive ways of doing things. This includes how we deal with garbage and waste. Just about everyday, things that could be used are thrown away in the dump. If we stopped doing that and used those resources, we could employ people and have the materials to solve problems, including our housing shortages.
'Summer in the City.' Let鈥檚 think about making the city cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter using the resources we have. Also, let鈥檚 look at ways to repurpose our old mines for other uses. Just a summer's thought.
