Ask The Families Of The Dead/Injured About Cost

As a society we can be very shallow and callous and it doesn't take much to get us riled and pissed off but we have short attention spans and today everything will be back to normal. Our "outrage" is put back on the shelf until the next ime. Remember the one day ILLEGAL strike and it's cost? Has the TTC union paid the money lost that day?

Not many stop to count cost
April 24, 2007
Jim Coyle

In the subway tunnel down below, a world had ended yesterday.

And up above, at Yonge St. and Lytton Blvd., an intersection of midtown prosperity and contentment, at a TTC access point not far from where the faux-log cabin that is the Roots flagship store looks across to the shrine to good times that is Sporting Life, the city's emergency hardware turned the streets into an image of urban life gone badly wrong.

There were workers in white hazardous-material suits, others lugging oxygen tanks to be ferried down to where calamity had struck. Along the curbs were lined the fire department's Emergency Decontamination Unit, a TTC command bus, the police Collision Reconstruction Unit van, an emergency rehabilitation unit for anyone stricken by subterranean poisons. There were a handful of fire engines, police cruisers all over the place and, amid the blinking of hazard lights and occasional belches of siren, officers directing sluggish and decidedly unhappy traffic.

Here and there huddled consultations were held by those whose salaries this day, whatever they were, were not enough for the job at hand.

That the day's sad toil would be a long business became evident, first with the notice taped to a subway station door that it would be closed "until further notice," then with the arrival of a portable Johnny On The Spot and crates of bottled water for emergency personnel on the far side of the yellow police tape.

Across the road, awaiting the grim results of proceedings, TV satellite trucks filled the little parking lot of a sandwich shop and dim sum emporium.

It is a tragic fact of life that people die on the job – more frequently, most years in this country, than die at war. Perhaps the wonder of it is, given all the risky business of men and machinery within even a few blocks of the accident site yesterday – the cranes soaring above condos under construction, the men on scaffolding refurbishing a nearby church, the gas line trenching down the city's most famous street – that it doesn't happen more often.

In most cases, industrial fatalities get scant attention. But not all accidents are equal. Let one close the subway and even those whose only injury is inconvenience consider themselves victims.

Despite the evident emergency, the furious blaring of horns continued yesterday, one frustrated commuter at another, as they inched past the emergency vehicles.

One woman, attractive but for her contorted face, and blind to the evidence of real problems scant metres away, glared and blared at another motorist who, turning in front of her from a side street, had denied her the two metres of pavement and five seconds saved that apparently meant the world.

Yet all around, because the horror of things was down below and out of sight, and because it involved someone else, not known to most, life and living went on here where the living is usually good.

The juxtaposition between the paraphernalia of catastrophe and nearby business-as-usual was jarring; the reminder so close to hand of how quickly calamity can change everything for anyone apparently a thought best not entertained for long.

On one side of the street, the men and women wore uniforms and emergency vests and hard hats. On the other, flip-flopped women pushed strollers – left hand steering, right for their Starbucks or chiller or Häagen-Dazs.

Folks wearing earbuds and carrying GAP bags, cyclists, strollers and dog walkers stopped briefly to ask their what-happeneds? and continued with their day. In the little parkette behind the station, children flew back and forth on the swings, oblivious to the scene down below. A diligent parking authority officer continued on his ticket-giving rounds.

For two categories of citizens, the event was a bonanza. Cabbies, of course, doing a land-office trade with the subway down. And toddlers wide-eyed at the impressive collection of emergency hardware arrayed before them.

But a senior citizen in a ball cap, out walking his dog, was less than pleased at the arsenal of equipment and proliferation of police and emergency personnel.

"So what's all this?" he demanded on the way past. "A friend of mine's house got robbed and it took two days for the police to show up. All they need is one guy here directing traffic and there's 16 standing around.

"C'mon Blackie," he said, shaking his head and tugging a leash. "Let's go."

With a section of the north-south Yonge line shut down, TTC shuttle buses laboured up and down the street, doing the work between Eglinton and York Mills stations that the subway normally does.

By a little after lunchtime, a supervisor standing outside the midpoint at Lawrence station laughed when asked if customers were getting a little cranky.

"Oh, yeah," she said, pulling her TTC jacket tightly around her. "This should have been bullet-proof."

"This doesn't happen too often, thank God," said one woman, whose most pressing problem this day was not tragedy or its aftermath but a longer trip between her life's points A and B.

And down below, a world had ended.

Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.