At this last weekend's fantastic Science Rendezvous, a lot of people were joking that the internet should get knocked out more often, as the four-hour fair was jam-packed with potential future-scientists.
Certainly, the higher than anticipated attendance was a major benefit to what was otherwise likely a costly 24-hours cut off from the hive mind for many people around town.
On my way to get some photographs of the rendezvous, I visited no less than four ATMs, including the lone one owned by a legitimate bank, with the intent of buying items for the East Three School travel club's fundraising efforts. They were all out of service and the places that hosted them all had signs saying "Cash Only."
Eventually, I was able to find a lone ATM that was in operation. It wasn't hard to miss — there was a line up stretching to the back of the store. With Northwestel cautioning they had no timeline for when internet or mobile services would be restored, I decided it would be pragmatic to pull out some emergency cash and joined them.
When I got to the ATM it was a great relief — first that I managed to get to it before the safe was cleaned out and second that I wasn't "that guy" who emptied the cash machine with 20 people waiting behind me. My ability to continue to access goods and services restored, my mind quickly went to the bigger question in all this: What happens if an outage forces all businesses to go "cash only" and no one can access any of their cash?
Like most living hominids, I don't keep a large reserve of paper cash lying around. It's easier to keep track of in a bank. Certainly in a town where an average grocery bill is several hundred dollars, I'm pretty sure I join the majority in using plastic rather than carrying several hundred dollar bills around on my person. So in the event of a major internet outage, like the one we experienced last August, not having long term access to physical cash could develop into other major problems.
Should Inuvik or another area in this potential "dead internet" zone face an evacuation order having internet disrupted could be disastrous. Aside from the difficulty in getting information to evacuees, if people aren't able to purchase gas, food or other essentials midway through an evacuation because everything's gone cash only and none of the bank machines work, people could end up stranded. It would be a humanitarian crisis.
All this being said, a select few of us, through either paying the premium for Starlink or other Northern magic tricks, were able to stay connected through the weekend, which was important as there were several key news events in the southern part of the territory, which has transitioned from snow season to disaster season, as MACA Minister Vince McKay coined our non-winter months. Meanwhile, here in the Beaufort Delta we're still getting lots of snow, if anyone wants any.
Jokes aside, I suspect there were at least some other services that were able to stay connected enough to function. During the outage last August I was able to use roaming services and my limited data to file news stories during the NWT Wildfire evacuation. So it's not as if we would all be back to abacuses and carrier pigeons.
But that's good if you can use it. At this point in history, all you need to be able to accept cash over the internet is an email address, something I'm sure every business in Inuvik has. All businesses should have an Electronic Money Transfer (EMT) account set up, at the very least for emergency situations like this past weekend. Then, should wildfires or other climate change disasters knock out our internet again, people will at least be able to pool their resources to keep things functioning.
We've been forced to function without Internet in town twice in less than a year. Since it's going to take our climate change mitigation efforts at least as long as it took us to create the climate crisis to start seeing an effect — assuming we don't abandon those mitigation efforts — we should be expecting this to be a regularly occurring problem for the rest of our lives.
We need to give ourselves as many options as possible to cope with these problems as they come up. Having EMT services available to cover groceries, gas or other needs would go a long way towards this. Fundraisers, particularly for youth efforts like the travel club and basketball team, should also have an EMT system set up for those of us who don't carry change around even in the good times.
It literally takes five minutes to set up and could save a lot of grief in the future.