Catastrophes

The best news items are usually a catastrophe of some sort, be it a volcano, hurricane or fire. These are the most exciting for us to watch, as we must all be thinking what it would be like to be caught in one. No one catastrophe is worse then the next as loss of life and possessions are usually the result. This week Calgary, a city 200 miles south of where I live, got hammered by relentless rain to the point where most of the downtown core was flooded. The storm was rotating counter clockwise dropping all it's rain up against the mountains where it rolled back faster then the cars on the adjoining highway to all the lower lying areas. Two or three towns were completely evacuated stranding hundreds of thousands.
It has occurred to me that many cities and towns were built in low lying areas where settlers had put up stakes in the past. Unfortunately many of these places were not the best place to build. They were convenient at the time as water was handy to get with minimal work getting it back to their shacks. But today, with the spread of these cities and all the land being paved over it has lead to these kind of things happening.
I feel really bad for our neighbours to the south, and wish them the best in dealing with what can only be a massive mess not to mention power outages and ruptured sewers. No, not something I would want to deal with. If we needed it, the work would have been great. But this provence is already short of skilled workers do to our oil industry, it will take a long time to dig out of this one for sure.