Reams of extreme sports terrain is a major reason people flock to Squamish, but driving Highway 99 is one activity most would like to keep adrenaline free. Unfortunately, wishful thinking has little sway on the mountains. The same cliffs that provide world-class climbing can crumble into devastating rockslides. Last week's rockslide in Porteau Cove was a 16,000 cubic metre emblem of our vulnerability.News that we had lost our major artery to Vancouver put many residents into panic mode. Grocery stores were scoured for food and stories began circulating about who was trapped "on the other side". Last week's shopping frenzy suggested few people had 72-hour emergency kits waiting at home. Apparently, reports of a rockslide are our cue to prepare for an emergency. While businesses did an outstanding job transporting people by sea and air, individual citizens might pause before patting themselves on the back.On the positive side, community members showed a moving commitment to Squamish by pouring into Loggers Sports events. But if the natural disaster were a bit less manageable, would we have been prepared to tough it out?Squamish is an area prone to floods, earthquakes and landslides, The closed highway was a mild sampling of what residents might encounter.Volunteers with the Squamish Emergency Program have admitted that urging people to prepare for a disaster often leaves them feeling like Chicken Little - a fabled character prone to hysteria who mistakenly believes the sky is falling. But when truck-size boulders careen down from the sky, such warnings suddenly ring with overdue credibility.How many of us had bottled water at home? Spare medication? Working flashlights? Preserved food? The next time a mountainside collapses near Squamish, it could be part of a larger disaster that leaves our town at the bottom of a West Coast fix-up list. When the 2010 Winter Olympics and highway improvement project are behind us, a closed road might not spur the same Herculean clean up effort we recently witnessed.Perhaps we could embrace this event as a wake up call.As wake up calls go, it was fairly painless. No one was injured, supplies still made it to Squamish, and many people were even able to follow through with travel plans. It was a thunderous nudge we should probably act upon.We may not enjoy hearing Chicken Little say "The sky is falling," but it certainly beats the cluck of "I told you so."
