Well, it’s a another week of news and views and here’s some of mine.
- Nice touch proposing to change one of the downtown streets – in this case, part of 11th Avenue – to a name that honours our veterans.
Calling the approach to the Campbell River cenotaph Veteran’s Way is a classy touch and I expect that Mayor Walter Jakeway’s proposal will get passed. It’s one of those ideas where you’re inclined to say, why hasn’t it been done before?
- Meanwhile, the Elk Falls Mill site sage continues.
We get word today about something I’m sure is on everybody’s mind, that being the environmental status of the mill site. Given the age of the mill site and the less stringent environmental regulations in previous years, you have to expect the site is polluted. That means it has to be cleaned up, which means it has to be assessed as to how bad it is and that process is nowhere near completed. In fact, it appears to be barely begun.
It may seem like badgering the new mill owner, Harold Jahn, but this is a prime property that has great potential to secure Campbell River’s economic future – much like it secured the city’s economic past. So, it has to be done right.
It’s somewhat related but I was living in Whitehorse when it was discovered that a brand new housing subdivision was releasing contamination originating from the site’s days as a military operation decades before. Not something you want to discover.
I doubt housing will ever go on the Catalyst site but it would be a prime spot for it. Still, we’re keeping an eye on the process to develop the site and we certainly don’t want it to be an environmental liability.
- What an amazing gash that was ripped through the Gold River Highway on Monday.
The power of water, eh? We ran a picture of the road after it was gouged out by the creek running under it through an apparently inadequate culvert. The washout was about four metres deep.
I saw an RCMP picture that showed the flood in the early stages and the water was flowing over the road surface. A short time later, it had washed away tons of asphalt and gravel to a depth of four metres. Wow!
I have to say, we frequently criticize anybody in public works or who contract services to the public, but the crew that got that road working again were pretty darn fast. Kudos to them.
BC Highways was predicting the road would be open to single lane, alternating traffic by Tuesday afternoon. But work crews laboured through the night and the road was open both ways by Tuesday morning.
Good job.