HHH wrote:
But I also think that the race has a responsibility to the people who have paid to run the race to have some fluids available at all of the advertised aid stations.
Say they had tables and tables set up with stacks of already filled cups, ready for tens of thousands of runners. Say some of the early runners came through the water stops, go to grab a cup and end up knocking hundreds of other cups off when they grab the one or two they actually use. We've now gone from an allocation of 5 - 6 cups per runner per water stop to 200 or more.
I suppose that is also the race's fault for not having security in place to keep runners away from the water tables?
Ahh, the answer may be to have volunteers hold individual cups out for runners to grab as they run by, thereby avoiding the stockpile on the tables.
So lets try some more math:
Each runner takes 5 cups through the course of each water stop (lets say they start at one of the early tables and take them evenly spaced throughout the entire station). That's still 225,000 cups to be handed out.
For the early stations, lets say the entire field would pass them in less than two hours (probably less than one for the very first one or two stations). That's 7200 seconds.
Lets also assume a water station volunteer needs 5 seconds to pick up a cup or two, step away from the table, hold the cup out and have it picked up by a runner. So in that two hours, each volunteer could theoretically hand out 1440 cups.
Since we want to distribute 225,000, that means at least 156 volunteers at each water stop handing out cups non-stop. But don't forget from my earlier post that we already need at least 100 more working non-stop to fill up all those cups and keep supplying newly filled ones. Then there is the matter of getting bulk water to each table for these fine folk to start distributing.
Just how many more volunteers (who are willing and able to work non-stop for several hours in rough conditions) are now needed for each of the 12 - 15 water stops when the forecast mere days before looks ominous? Remember, you can't just get a few school groups to do this because you need competent people who know what they are doing and genuinely want to be there (or else you need to look at getting two to three times more volunteers).
I highly doubt water actually ran out. I'm guessing Chicago, like most major urban centers has potable water in their mains and more than they could ever want could be obtained by hooking up to a fire hydrant. (They do have fire hydrants in Chicago, don't they?) Afterall, they were able to hook up misting stations (which don't require hundreds of volunteers to operate).
But as we've seen, the problem appears to be with the actual logistics of getting the water from the hydrants (presumably located near most water stations) to each of the presumably 100 or more tables, into each of the 225,000 cups and then delivered successively to each of the 45,000 entered runners.
But yeah, sure, it is obviously negligent of the race director and crew to not be able to overcome this minor little detail on relatively short term notice.