Something Sure Seems Screwy About Niagara Region’s Solar Eclipse Emergency Declaration

Was This Declaration Necessary? Did It Help Or Hurt? And How Well Was It Communicated To Our Municipal Leaders And Others That Needed To Know?

A News Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter/publisher Doug Draper

Posted April 15th, 2024 on Niagara At Large

It’s beginning to look like one municipal party in Niagara or another may not be giving us the straight goods around the Regional Government’s decision to declare a “State of Emergency” in the days leading up to the April 8th Solar Eclipse that reached totality in the skies over Niagara Fall.

At the very least, there appears to have been some kind of communication breakdown between the parties over this declaration.

Whatever may have gone off the rails here, it isn’t a good thing– especially for people who may be facing the possibility of a real emergency which, in the case of the April 8^th solar fest, at least some did not believe an emergency declaration was warranted at all.

Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati, whose city was at the centre of hosting what he predicted may be as many as a million or more people attending the celestial event (the turn-out, according to police was actually somewhere around 200,000), certainly didn’t think so.

During an interview Diodati did with CBC TV news anchor on the day of the eclipse and short after it happened, he said; “We (his city) was not consulted (by the Region about its plans to declare a state of emergency) and there was no emergency.”

“I think the state of emergency is for an actual emergency,” the mayor went on, adding that “unfortunately” when people planning to come to Niagara Falls heard about the declaration, at least some of them decided to stay away.

Diodati said representatives for hotels and other tourist venues in the city shared complaints with him that they got calls from people who were “panicked” and cancelled their reservation after news of the declaration got around.

That was the Niagara Falls mayor’s take on the emergency declaration. Niagara’s Regional Government had another.

In an April 12^th story in The St. Catharines Standard, the Region’s Chief Administrative Officer Ron Tripp reportedly told the newspaper that ‘the decision to issue the declaration wasn’t made in a vacuum, and Niagara Falls officials were among those involved in the planning sessions for it.’

 “I’ve been meeting with representatives of the 12 local councils every week, co-ordinating contingency plans and the rest of it,” Tripp was quoted telling the newspaper, “and it was vividly clear that we were planning to issue the declaration for at least the last six weeks.”

In the same April 12^th newspaper article, Niagara Regional Chair Jim Bradley, explained that the final decision , signed by him, to proactively issue the declaration was made, at least in part, to ere on the side of caution.

“I wish we could have called it something like a ‘declaration of preparation,’ because all it was doing was ensuring that we had all the available resources should something happen,” Bradley was quoted telling  Standard reporters. “I think we would have been justifiably criticized if a major event, such as an infrastructure failure or a major accident, had occurred and we had not made every effort to prepare for it.”

That seems to make sense.

Making sure you are properly prepared for the possibility of a million or more people showing up (the actual number who came, according to Niagara Parks police estimates, was closer to 200,000) certainly sounds like a good idea.

But something is off here.

Assuming that both sides are giving us the straight goods about who was and who wasn’t consulted over something as serious as declaring a state of emergency, it’s hard to understand why such a critical decision didn’t filter it’s way up to the mayor of the city where most of the action – good, bad or catastrophic – was going to take place?

“Had this been an actual emergency,” as the old line from Canada’s National Public Alert System goes, any possibility that a state of emergency was declared and the mayor of one of Niagara’s largest municipalities – not to mention the municipality located smack dab in the middle of the zone of concern, or in the case of the solar eclipse, what astronomers call “the path of totality” – was not given a heads-up should be a concern to all of us.

What if we had been talking about a real disaster like severe flooding, a life-threatening wind storm or something else of that nature?

No matter how many of our Niagara Regional Councillors and local Municipal Mayors and Councillors do or do not take declaring an emergency around climate or any other potentially life-threatening event seriously, the pre-emptive emergency declared for the April 8^th solar eclipse should give rise to  questions about when and for what reasons states of emergency are declared in this region.

And it should certainly raised concerns  about how information about how well or thoroughly the issuance of a state of emergency gets around to our municipal leaders, to our public institutions, to members of the business community and to the general public.

Given the amount of money we who live, work and operate businesses in Niagara are now paying in municipal taxes, we certainly deserve better service than what we apparently got in the lead-up to this solar eclipse.

• Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

To watch and hear the interview CBC did with Mayor Jim Diodati on the day of the April 8^th eclipse, click on the screen below –

To read the piece Niagara At Large posted when Niagara’s Regional Government declared a State of Emergency ahead of the date for the Solar Eclipse, click on – https://niagaraatlarge.com/2024/03/29/upcoming-solar-eclipse-has-niagara-region-effective-immediately-proactively-declaring-a-state-of-emergency/ .

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