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| FTLComm - Tisdale - Tuesday, September 16, 2003 | ||||||
 Friday a Carrot River woman brought her mother to Tisdale for a dental appointment. They were a little early for the appointment and parked downtown. As she was digging in her purse he mother got out of the car in front of Banda Flooring and started off down the sidewalk. This patch of what should be sidewalk was what brought the elderly woman down. She popped both kneecaps, sprained a wrist and split her lip wide open. The owner of Banda Flooring rushed out with tissue to help |
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 the woman but indeed the damage had been done. I took these pictures this morning with rather dull lighting but look carefully at the angle of things in the top picture. The street light standard is verticle as are the building store fronts, the wide angle lens of the camera gives the store fronts some distortion but notice how the base of the street light standard towers around the surface of the walkway. This is the story. Tisdale's main street is descending and the serious August drought this summer took it down some more from the bad situation I recorded back in April 2nd after Kevin McIntyre pointed out that he could not use his wheel chair on the sloping Tisdale sidewalks. |
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 In the scale of things North Steel is a major employer, so are the health facilities in the community yet Tisdale's down town two blocks employs 168 full time workers and many part time workers being the largest employer in the community. This does not include those who work on the streets connecting to the this two block area. When you consider that the income of this many people depends upon people coming to this area to do business, can this community afford not to do something about its deplorable sidewalks? |
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 Nature has been totally unfair to Tisdale's streets but the huge expenditure five or six years ago is all but lost. The paving stones put in place then are crumbling right beneath our stumbling feet and for the elderly the crumbling material is still enormously unforgiving when you fall upon it. I am not physically impaired in any way and I am challenged to get safely down this street and with only a little ice here and there the challenge is magnified. |
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 But don't worry about this problem it will no longer be a problem when people take their business elsewhere and unless something is done quickly those 168 jobs are all in jeopardy. Tisdale competes with Nipawin, and Melfort for the same services and we all in turn compete with Prince Albert and Saskatoon. None of these communities have such adverse walking conditions. The last picture is on the South side of the Bank of Nova Scotia where there is just conventional concrete sidewalk. This walk way is not that old, about the same age as that in front of the post office and both are as badly chemically damaged. Even this surface is very hard to walk on and even worse to try and clean in the winter time. The bottom line is the bottom line. Either get to work and spend the money needed to replace all of these walk ways raise them to accessible heights or face law suits, but that is not the worst consequence, the worst situation is that no one says anything but just drives on to another community to get their products and services. It is hard to encourage people to buy and shop locally with unacceptable conditions like these. |
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