Is Henny Penny City Hall's Secret Adviser?

---

 A comment in an editorial in the local daily was the inspiration to explore the possibility that  Henny Penny is a chief adviser at city hall. Perhaps she may enjoy a high ranking position within the city hall senior management, and maybe has even been elected to our city council.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Henny Penny, she was the central character in the story perhaps best known as Chicken Little. Although the fable has been around for centuries in one form or another, most of us are familiar with the version where the hapless chicken is struck by a falling acorn, and mistakenly is sent into a panic, convinced the sky is now falling.

"The sky is falling!" features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.

Is Believing That "The Big One" Could Happen Any Moment
The Local Version of 'The Sky Is Falling"?

If you have lived on the west coast for any length of time I am sure you have heard  "it is not a matter of 'if' the big one will hit, but only a matter of 'when'". Sound familiar? When pressed to predict when such an event may occur, the answer is 'we simply don't know, but the data indicates that prediction is true'. Says who?

Just because you say something again and again and again, does not make it true. At best it is a guess based on about 100 years of data. Given, the science community still can not predict the weather, how in the blazes do they say they can predict earthquakes?

Haida Qwaii is a perfect example in recent history. A 7.7 quake, with an epicenter only 80 km away from a community caused neither personal injury, nor property damage.

Our old annex withstood a 7.3 quake back in the 1940's and a 3.3 on Dec.26, 2012 without so much as dropping a brick.

What can you conclude? Predicting when a quake may occur, the magnitude of that quake, the probability of that quake and the probable ensuing damage is at the very best educated guess work based on a whole lot of assumptions!

How Much Public Safety Can the Public Afford?

You may recall that in one version of the Chicken Little story, the witless chicken on the way to warn the king, gathered an entourage along the way who believed his dire warnings. Finally, they all met a fox who invited them to come to his lair to tell the story, where he promptly ate them all. The moral of this version is to not believe everything you hear.

The way this moral could apply to Nanaimo and our current policy of unaffordable spending? If we keep spending untold millions guarding against an event that may never happen we could very well wind up being the most unaffordable place on the planet to live, with the result that no one chooses to live here as they simply can't afford to. So the 'fox' of over taxation eventually has us all for lunch.

Examples of 'The Sky Is Falling' Based Policies

$82,000,000.00 for a water treatment plant to treat water that has proven safe for 150 years!

$16,000,000.00 for a shiny new office with shiny new furniture for city hall staff.

$4,000,000.00 giveaway of a building the Canadian Building Code and Work Safe BC would not require upgrading!

$7,000,000.00 to remove dams that have proven safe for 100 years!