[URBAN NOTE] Four links on cities around the world: Churchill, Halifax, London, New York City

[rfmcdonald]

• CBC reports on how the Hudson Bay port of Churchill could profit from global warming opening up sea lanes but suffer from heaving land wrecking infrastructure.


• Brett Bundale reports on how Halifax, Nova Scotia, is booming, unlike the rest of the Maritimes.


• This article describing how the London police remain vague about the number of dead in Grenfell Tower is horrifying.


• Global News reports on how many in Harlem dislike the idea of renaming their neighbourhood's south "SoHa".

Comments

[ffutures]

The Grenfell thing is unfortunately a consequence of the sheer scale and intensity of the fire - there are unidentified bodies in public areas, there are a lot of missing people, there's a huge amount of debris which might be covering more remains, and they don't want to say people are dead until they are sure. The total they're sure of is slowly creeping up, but it may be weeks more before they've finished. This isn't like a house fire - about 350 people lived there, 73 are actually reported missing, and some are simply unaccounted for, one way and another. As of Monday they'd identified 32 victims, with a lot of unidentified remains.

I've been past the building several times since the fire, it's next to the Hammersmith and City railway line which I use a couple of times a week, and the sheer scale of it is obvious if you look at the mess that's left. It just isn't going to be a fast job.

[rfmcdonald]

Yeah. My horror relates somewhat more to the fact that there can be such terrible uncertainty. All those poor people.

[ffutures]

The politics of all this are scary - basically, endless committees that did nothing useful about safety over a decade or more because nobody was really making it happen. And that's just in Kensington, nationally it's a horrible mess.