I’m not going to be able to top Aaron Besecker’s razor sharp opener from The Buffalo News on eclipse day, so I’m just going to quote his savage newspaper lede instead: “Traffic jams had something in common with the sun Monday: There was no sign of them all day.”
Zing. Absolute banger of a line.
After being told for weeks on end that the eclipse was going to create an apocalyptic traffic jam, with gridlocked cars stretching bumper-to-bumper from Niagara Falls to Fort Erie, what we ended up getting was...almost nothing. In fact, Fort Erie was a weird ghost town all day. There were fewer cars driving around town than on a normal day.
The amount of money that was squandered on this thing is incomprehensible. The municipalities went around putting porta-potties in parking lots all over the place, only to have all those parking lots sit empty all day. The only cars I saw in any of the parking lots in Fort Erie or Port Colborne were cop cars, sitting there doing nothing, save collecting overtime pay.
But the massive waste of public dollars and the complete lack of traffic jams are not what I wanna focus on for this particular eclipse story.
The real tragedy here (besides the cloud cover) was how badly we embarrassed ourselves as a region by preemptively declaring a state of emergency a full week before the eclipse.
Besides making us seem like a bunch of mollycoddling, nanny state, soft soy boys, the declaration of a state of emergency for a very obviously non-emergency situation was a very bad idea for two key reasons.
An eclipse is not an emergency. Full stop.
The first being that it likely played a part in dampening the crowds. The “one million visitors” number that was being tossed around for weeks ahead of time was always pure fantasy (plucked seemingly arbitrarily by city officials in Niagara Falls with no real supporting evidence). The fact that attendance ended up being so lacklustre was in all likelihood precisely because the “state of emergency” scared people away from coming. Mayor Jim Diodati said exactly that too, and while he played a role in hyping up the fictional million visitors in the first place, he’s also not wrong when he says the state of emergency killed the crowds.
Which was a bummer for a lot of businesses. A lot of restaurants and shops in Port Colborne and Niagara Falls pumped marketing money into the eclipse hype and staffed up with extra people, only to watch it all fizzle out. Crystal Beach hosted three days of events with concerts and food trucks and all sorts of cool stuff, and kudos to them for doing so, but from what I saw, it all looked pretty sparsely attended. Fort Erie was bracing for big crowds, but I went out to dinner after watching the eclipse, around 5 p.m., and my buddy and I were, literally, the only people in the restaurant.
Lost revenue is one thing, but the thing that grinds my gears the most about the state of emergency declaration is the simple fact that it was a gross abuse of power. An eclipse is not an emergency. Full stop. The Niagara Region claims it did so out of “an abundance of caution” but that just doesn’t cut it.
Especially coming on the heels of the pandemic, where government overreach hit absurd levels (remember when they closed golf courses out of “an abundance of caution”) we should be very cautious how and when we decide to declare something an emergency.
Not just because it opens the door to future non-emergencies being declared emergencies, but because it dulls the general public to the entire concept of a state of emergency. Your average person saw the news about the state of emergency and rolled their eyes, then, it turned out all the eye rolling was entirely justified because there was no emergency.
If the Niagara Region keeps crying wolf about states of emergency every time there’s some minor thing happening, soon enough we’ll all stop caring.
Which is a shame because we’re going to need it for the next lunar emergency, which will be in September 2026 when NASA is scheduled to land astronauts on the moon for the first time (unlike the one Stanley Kubrick faked in 1969) and the world goes into panic mode when it turns out the moon isn’t even real and the eclipse is just a glitch in The Matrix programming.
James Culic can tell Buzz Aldrin didn’t really walk on the moon. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or scrawl your best moon-landing/communist fluoride/Area 51 conspiracy theory and send it as a letter to the editor.
