Vancouver's architecture, by design, was never meant to handle extreme heat

Two summers ago, as Dennis Laplante baked beneath the skylights in his home during a lethal heat wave, he decided the day had come to use the emergency space blankets he’d been saving for 20 years.

He dug two of the crinkly silver blankets out of his basement and hauled them up a three-metre ladder to reach the windows. Using some curtain rods, he rigged the material against the skylights to block the sun from getting in his 1980s townhouse.

“It was quite cheap and it worked really well,” said Laplante, now 70, who has lived in Vancouver’s Champlain Heights neighbourhood nearly half his life.

“The space blankets actually degraded in the sun,” he noted. “The following year and this year

→ Continue reading at CBC News

Related articles

Comments

Share article

Latest articles