When Jamella Hagen and her boyfriend planned a four-day road trip to bring his new electric pickup truck from Vancouver to Whitehorse, she anticipated challenges.

She knew the gaps between fast chargers in the North, so they planned stops in communities with EV charging stations.

What she did not anticipate were the wildfires.

“Our choice to drive an EV was an attempt to reduce our personal impact on climate change,” she wrote in a CBC first person column. “But on the road, we encountered climate change disasters all around us, and we had to cope with them while learning to use a new and still fragile charging network.”

Some of the routes Hagen planned to take were shut down and redirected to make room for evacuees leaving Kelowna and the Shuswap region.

Knowing the EV truck wouldn’t make a long distance between chargers, Hagen made unexpected stops, like a hotel where a charger was a 20 minute walk away. Hardly unusual, she said, as she often finds EV chargers located in inconvenient places, such as the edges of town or behind buildings.

“If I was travelling as a single woman, I would have found myself missing the comfort of a brightly lit gas station on a lonely stretch of highway.”

Overall, Hagen says she’ll still consider buying an electric vehicle herself while living in the north, but only if her family had an additional, fuel-powered car at the ready.

  • OtterOPEnglish
    13•1 year ago

    I was unsure at first, but part of it might be the type of article.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/first-person-faq-1.5927006

    First Person columns are personal stories and experiences of Canadians, in their own words. This is intended to showcase a more intimate storytelling perspective, and allow people from across the country to share what they have lived through.

    So it’s one person’s account of what they experienced and how they feel. There might not be a specific point to the piece, but rather you can take from it what you will. I saw it as advocating for further improving the charging network, in particular focussing on the issue of how forest fires might impact it.

    It’s also a bad title. The content is decent, but if you just read the title it’s bad.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      Thanks for doing that research. I read the summary which is all written in third person and assumed that was the whole article. Less likely to be malicious if it’s just the newspaper’s equivalent of a personal blog…