As L already posted, we’ve been under a water boiling advisory for about 36 hours now. I sort of feel like I’m back in Thailand, having to get bottled water to drink. At least I can put TP into the toilet here and I actually get the container when I order a bottle of pop instead of a bag filled with ice and a straw.

I was some ready to rant about this. I have never in my life lived in a place where the tap water wasn’t completely safe; where you could just walk up to a tap and drink. I wondered how a country as rich as Canada could have the water supply of its third largest city at the mercy of the weather. Water is just…there, to be taken for granted. How could Vancouver not have a water treatment plant, my thinking went. If Atlanta can pull it together, surely it’s not that big a problem.

Then, at Lorraine’s urging, I went looking for facts instead of throwing my “irate” switch.

• Two long-time Vancouver residents I spoke with had no memory of this ever happening before.
• As of midnight on 12 November, Vancouver had already exceeded the average rainfall amount for the month of November, which is historically the wettest month. (As an aside, it is currently raining again.)
• The land upslope of the reservoirs was already saturated with water when the winds and rain started again on the 15th.
• There were several landslides into the reservoirs.
• Turbidity (which I learned is a measure of how cloudy the water is) should have a value of roughly 1. On Wednesday, it was above 30. (Link to current readings.)

I remember relearning parallax in my astronomy course. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system got wildly complicated as astronomers hacked and rehacked the model to explain why it sometimes appeared that planets went backwards in their orbits and changed brightness.

My wronged outrage at being forced to live like, well, many millions of people in the world got harder and harder to sustain when faced with more and more facts. It eventually collapsed under the weight of its own exceptions.

I should have come to this conclusion long before I did: sometimes things just break, even if they’re important.

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