{"id":312075,"date":"2010-02-12T13:03:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T18:03:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenrightnow.com\/?p=9002"},"modified":"2010-02-12T13:03:30","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T18:03:30","slug":"mother-nature-may-not-play-nice-with-vancouver-olympic-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/312075","title":{"rendered":"Mother Nature may not play nice with Vancouver Olympic Games"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Just<\/p>\n

Olympic village scene? No, just another Winter day in Kaufman County, Texas. (Photo: Green Right Now)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By Bill Sullivan<\/a>
\nGreen Right Now<\/strong><\/p>\n

If the Winter Games don\u2019t work out in Vancouver<\/a> this year, the International Olympic Committee can always consider a future move to\u2026Dallas?<\/p>\n

Blame it on global warming or just bad luck, but the 2010 Games will get off to a queasy start for hosts and athletes alike. While the East Coast is buried in white stuff, and normally mild North Texas enjoyed a day-long snow on Thursday (ending with a record 11.2 inches recorded at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport), folks in British Columbia were scrambling to make at least one Olympic venue look like a winter wonderland \u2013 with mixed success.<\/p>\n

At Cypress Mountain<\/a>, in the lower hills outside the host city, officials have been importing snow to create a freestyle ski run scheduled to host medal competition in moguls on Saturday night.<\/p>\n

For Olympic organizers, Mother Nature has been quite the tease in the days leading up to Friday\u2019s Opening Ceremony. Just as things were looking especially bleak at Cypress, the skies dropped several inches of unexpected powder on Wednesday. Before anyone could get too excited about that, forecast rains for Friday through Tuesday threatened an untimely turn for the worse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an ironic twist for an organizing committee that vowed to make these the \u201cgreenest\u201d Winter Games ever: Instead of snow and ice, spring is threatening to break out in some parts of the Olympic region.<\/p>\n

\"cypress<\/p>\n

Cypress Mountain skiier (Photo: Cypress Mountain Resort)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The problems started last month, when Vancouver experienced its warmest January on record. While temperatures in the mid-to-high 40s are making for a strange backdrop for Winter Games, the heat wave and accompanying lack of snow has been particularly visible \u2013 and worrisome — at Cypress.<\/p>\n

As recently as last week, the freestyle course was largely grass and mud, creating a need for some creative thinking.<\/p>\n

Air-crane helicopters scooped up dirty snow from the other side of the mountain to lay a base. Trucks brought in whiter, more aesthetically pleasing stuff from higher elevations. Tubes filled with dry ice will be installed at the moguls and aerials courses to keep the runs from turning to slush when in use.<\/p>\n

With global warming and climate change such hot topics, the problems in Vancouver are likely to spur even more debate. In truth, however, weather extremes often pose problems at the Winter Games.<\/p>\n

Prior to the 1964 Games at Innsbruck, the Austrian Army was pressed into action to transport 20,000 blocks of ice to luge and bobsled runs and another 1.4 million cubic feet of snow to the slopes. In 1988, in Calgary, television cameras took only the tightest shots of the ski runs because anything off the course was mostly rocks and mud, the result of unseasonably warm temperatures.<\/p>\n

In 1994, in Lillehammer, a last-minute blizzard provided needed powder. And in Nagano, in 1998, sudden storms and fog showed little regard for the Alpine schedule.<\/p>\n

Vancouver may simply become yet another host with bad timing and worse luck.<\/p>\n

“We’ve pretty much done everything humanly possible to get conditions where we wanted them,” said Tim Gayda, the vice president of sport for the Vancouver organizing committee. “It’s been a monumental task.”<\/p>\n

No one thought much of it when a warm front moved into the city and the lower mountains around New Year\u2019s Day. The early season had produced reasonable snows. Everything appeared to be on schedule. El Ni\u00f1o<\/a> winds from Hawaii have been known to warm things up during a Vancouver winter, but the effect rarely lasted more than a few days.<\/p>\n

This one decided to stay a while.<\/p>\n

January\u2019s mean temperature was 45 degrees (Fahrenheit), more than seven degrees above normal. That\u2019s the warmest January on record (statistics officially have been kept since 1937) and a whopping five degrees above the previous high.<\/p>\n

The fact that it isn\u2019t snowing in Vancouver is no surprise; it normally rains there in the winter. The lack of snow in the mountains is the twist.<\/p>\n

The North Shore range, an area that includes Cypress Mountain, normally has about 78 inches of snow by this time of season. This year, it has less than half that (about 35 inches). According to Environment Canada<\/a>, the nation\u2019s official weather service, that dramatic a drop happens about once a decade.<\/p>\n

Forecasts<\/a> for Friday and Saturday, from Environment Canada, aren\u2019t particularly encouraging.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, up north at Whistler<\/a>, midweek conditions caused a juggling of the schedule of training runs in preparation for Saturday\u2019s men\u2019s downhill. The problem: Too much snow. By late week, a different problem had emerged. That abundance of powder was being threatened by rain and fog.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2010 | Distributed by Noofangle Media<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Olympic village scene? No, just another Winter day in Kaufman County, Texas. (Photo: Green Right Now) By Bill Sullivan Green Right Now If the Winter Games don\u2019t work out in Vancouver this year, the International Olympic Committee can always consider a future move to\u2026Dallas? Blame it on global warming or just bad luck, but the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}