LETTER – Seniors deserve better treatment from City during heat wave

Is this who we’ve become?

BC coroners report from 2021 stated that 619 people in BC died due to heat related illness with 90% over the age of 60 years. Not surprisingly Kamloops had amongst the highest death rates with 17 casualties within the city limits, this comes to 17.4 per 100,000 ppl, as compared to Kelowna which had a 10.4 per 100,000 casualty death rate. I think it would be reasonable to think that with such a high death rate and living in such an extreme weather environment that we’d be better prepared the next time around, I was wrong. Kamloops was the only city in the province which did not have a municipal cooling centre set up. How could this be?

Approx 4% of the population are 80 and over yet they accounted for 243 (40%) of the deaths according to the Report to the Chief Coroner of British Columbia. Haven’t we learnt anything, didn’t we go thru the same problems with covid, is this so hard to understand that our aged are our most vulnerable and need added protections, what are we doing?

The city Facebook page has multiple posts day after day warning people, particularly seniors, of the dangers of the heat, giving suggestions how to stay safe and providing contact information of governmental and nonprofit agencies who could help. One post read “plan ahead by identifying places in your community you can visit to get cool, such as libraries or shopping malls, or plan on visiting someone you know with air conditioning or a shaded yard”. Our city is telling our seniors, many of whom don’t drive or are shut-ins to visit a friend with air conditioning or take a trip to the mall all the whilst other cities are providing phone numbers to call for a driver to come pick them up and deliver them safely to a city run cooling station. What city would you prefer to live in?

Angered at my hometown’s lack of support for our most vulnerable, I visited the Sportscentre on McArthur Island over the weekend to see why it couldn’t be used, after all it’s a lower income area, it has older homes many without air conditioning, it has an older population and more people from the north shore died in our last heat wave than the south shore. I found that one rink was being used but the other 2 were empty and without ice. I took a picture of the interior of the near vacant building and posted it along with a few words to several local FB pages Monday morning. Within a few hours several hundreds of people had made comments of their dismay in the city and not long after lunch city admin reversed their decision and decided to open the arena up as a cooling centre. Is this what it has come to, citizens having to shame the city administrators to take any actions?

The Silent Generation are now in their 80’s, they grew up in the depression and then during WW ll, they learnt old world values of a hard work ethic, selflessness, loyalty, modesty, frugality and patriotism. They waited their turn only to be overrun by the boomers and now in their greatest time of need they find themselves at the mercy of the ME Generation. These Gen Xers are in charge and they want a Pac and a multiplex, they want new curling facilities, fitness centres and a wave pool and most of all they want them now dammit. Surely we must be able to find a few crumbs lying about to help those that came before us, we don’t have to treat all of our seniors like a lady in a purple sweater and a walking stick.

MAC GORDON