My town on the fringe of the largest city in Canada is growing rapidly. This summer we are experiencing a severe water shortage and the town has asked for everyone to cut back on as much water use as they can. All outdoor water use has been banned. We have also experienced a number of days right at the power useage limit and again the local authorities have asked people to cut back on power useage.
So, if we are right at the limit on water and power usage, why are they still building houses in the area like there is no tommorow? They just broke ground on one of the largest sub-divisons to be built in the region. What happens when those 500 homes come on line? Will there be enough water and power?
I am not a development expert, but simple common-sense would indicate that you stop doing something if you can’t supply the basic services - even a kid knows that. So why does the development continue unabated? Seems strange to me.
Fleck - I live in AZ in the middle of the desert where we are in anothe drought (11 of the last 13yrs have been drought years) and they keep sprawling further and further out. In fact even when our drinking resovirs were below 40% capacity last summer there were no water restrictions. At least your community is proactive there. Phoenix is well reactive isn’t a strong enough word. Amazingly people keep flocking to this "paradise (aka hell) in the desert at the tune of close to 100,000 per year.
The limitations you describe are not resource limitations, but infrastructure limitations. Hopefully the plans are in place to improve the infrastructure to handle the new development, and the new development will provide a big chunk of the funding to pay for it.
Of course, the real answer is the developers have the politicians in their pocket, but that is probably obvious.
The limitations you describe are not resource limitations.
Art,
Possibly. However, the town currently draws water from an underground aquifer, which if I am to understand the reports I have seen, is at critcally low levels and not recovering to it’s former levels year to year. Now, we do have large fresh water lakes near by( Lake Simcoe and Ontario) but as you point out extraordinary infrastructure would/could be built at some point to get access to this water. However, because both of these water sources are in different municipalities, there would be some politics involved as well.
As for the power - there are no new power generation plants planned. In fact, the Ontario government in a move to try to get us on-line with Kyoto carbon limits is planning on taking a number of coal fired plants off-line in a few years so I am not sure how you can be at the limit, then reduce the total capacity and somehow get more out of the system. I am not an engineer, but it does not make sense to me.
If there is one thing Canada has is fresh water. They have some large percentage of the fresh water in the world, if my memory serves. It is pretty hard to take that concern seriously. Maybe you have to build a pipe. That is no big deal.
The power plants won’t go off line resulting in brown outs. Never going to happen. I am guessing they aren’t supposed to go off line until after the next election. If they are needed, that will be true for the next election cycle too.