As a hot-spot city lying directly in the path of totality for Monday’s rare total solar eclipse, Belleville civic officials are as ready as they can be to host an expected influx of visitors, said Fire Chief Dan Smith, director of Fire and Emergency Services.
The big challenge for a solar eclipse working group preparing for the big day has been pegging how many people may make the trip into the friendly city for the celestial show of a lifetime, he said.
Estimating an advance headcount of visitors and their impact on city roads, parking and emergency services hasn’t proved reliable despite best efforts, said Smith, emergency services coordinator of the working group which met Thursday morning.
News reports suggest cities such as Kingston and Niagara Falls could see up to 500,000 to one million out-of-town visitors, respectively, given they are also in the path of totality.
“How many people are coming? We don’t know. There’s no way to track that. We look at hotel bookings but you’ve got to think, one hockey tournament can fill the hotels. One wedding can fill an entire hotel. Right now, bookings for Belleville [for Monday] are on par with a major hockey tournament,” Smith said. “We’ve been doing that kind of stuff but it’s not really giving us any solid numbers.”
“The rooms are booking up but they’re not at capacity but, it shows people are coming to town,” he said, positing that if a huge wave of visitors were set to visit the city, “they would have been booked far in advance.”
And, Smith said, given the solar eclipse is a one-off afternoon event Monday, any surge of visitors could simply be day trippers who are travelling into the city from outside of the path of totality or neighbouring regions experiencing cloudy weather.
That scenario has prompted the solar eclipse working group made up of Belleville Fire, Belleville Police, Hastings-Quinte Paramedic Services and the city’s Transit Services as well as Operations and Transportation department to prepare for all foreseeable precautions to make sure city residents and visitors remain safe.
Quinte West OPP as well as Mohawk Fire department has also been sitting in on working group meetings.
Belleville Police has a solid traffic management plan already in place that can be relied on for times like high traffic expected Monday, Smith said, adding police, fire and city departments will also be asking their staff complements to be on hand for backup.
As reported earlier by The Intelligencer, the working group is overseeing an extensive plan to ensure all roads, streets and major thoroughfares remain open not only to handle incoming and outgoing traffic but also to maintain safe passage for emergency vehicles responding to calls for assistance, Smith said.
Signs were also scheduled to go up Friday on Highway 401 exchanges in Belleville advising travelers not to stop on the roadside to view the eclipse, rather, to drive to the CAA Arena parking lot in the city where they can rest and view the spectacle safely.
The eclipse will start at 2:08 p.m. on Monday and will completely subside at 4:33 p.m.
Totality, meaning the moment when the moon will completely block out the sun, will happen at 3:22 p.m. and run for two minutes, four seconds.
Observers are reminded not to look directly at the eclipse without certified safety glasses.
Looking at the effects of the eclipse can damage eyesight and even cause blindness in worst-case scenarios, Hastings-Prince Edward Public Health has advised.