I forgot how irritating the public is. I had to get blood drawn and there was a 2 hr wait. Did I make a fuss? No, I sat my pretty self down and made the best of my time. What did 2 middle age white men do? Complain, get angry, stress out the staff, refer to the staff as "girls" when they are women with medical degrees, and act like petulant children. Like sirs, have you never had to wait in your life? Do you understand the women (who are going to poke you with needles) do not control the system and they dont deserve to be made to feel unsafe? And the audacity to say it is a human rights infringement that you (as a walk in) have to wait for your turn when others have an appointment? And that not having a cell phone did not inhibit your ability to make an appointment, you just dont understand the procedure? I am rambling but man was yesterday irritating! Like why cant you just disassociate during your wait time like me??
Chris Harley smelled Kitsilano Beach before he even arrived.
The odour permeating from the British Columbia beach in late June signified one thing — death.
Extreme heat temperatures, rising up to 40 C in Vancouver, had caused sea animals like mussels, clams and snails to cook to their death.
“It’s (like) leaving a car in a hot parking lot,” Harley told the Star, recounting his visit to the beach. “It gets a lot hotter than the air does. So that’s what happens to the shoreline when it’s out in the sun and low tide.”
Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, roughly estimates that a total of one billion animals died in the Salish Sea off the coast of Vancouver during the heat wave, but says his team is still gathering data and whatever the actual number is, it’s massive. This is in addition to the human impact. The B.C. Coroners Service reported a total of 777 sudden deaths in the province from June 25 to July 1 — a considerably higher number than the same period last year — and officials presume heat waves to be a significant contributing factor.
“It’s a reminder that yes, there are very important human tolls to climate change, but the whole system around us is changing too, and we don’t know what all of the consequences of those changes are going to be.”
Harley calls mussels the “poster child” indicator of the heat’s devastation to the sea, explaining that they were the most vulnerable and obvious when they died. They also play a role in water quality.
“Marine mussels, the ones that are dying here, just like freshwater mussels, they’re filter feeders so they do clear out particles in the water and make the water a little clearer,” explained Harley, adding that mussels are in the middle of the food web.
Extreme heat caused the death of what one marine biologist estimates to be roughly one billion animals in the Salish Sea.
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