Vancouver Island Marine Traffic Stations to be shut down

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There are only five marine communication and traffic stations (MCTS) in the Pacific Region monitoring shipping traffic such as tankers, ferries, and cruise ships.

Three of these stations will be closed.

Canada Coast Guard has announced that it will close Vancouver, Ucluelet and Comox MCTS centres and keep the two in Prince Rupert and Victoria. Those two centres will then be responsible for all waters off the BC coast.

Who is left to watch the BC coastline?

It is very early to determine exactly how the distribution of the work will be divided by the two centres, but there is great concern over a combined MCTS centre in Prince Rupert, which already has the largest area of responsibility in Canada over doubling their area of coverage and moving to 30 mountain top VHF sites to monitor along with radar, transponder traffic and the busiest cruising grounds area of Desolation sound and Barkley Sound from a centre 400 miles away.

Vancouver will lose its MCTS centre, which handles more marine traffic than any port in Canada and also will be losing the busiest search and rescue station in Canada at Kitsilano.

What happens in a disaster?

These cutbacks come at a time when plans are to increase oil tanker traffic. Tankers for Enbridge, Kinder Morgan, LNG will further make BC’s coastal waters the busiest in the world.

The increase in tanker traffic and pleasure craft activity on BC waters requires more than just 2 centres.  In cases of equipment and power failure there is no backup system. The two proposed sites in Sidney and Seal Cove Prince Rupert lie within the tsunami hazard zone, unlike Vancouver and Comox. When warnings are issued, officers will be unable to do more than broadcast a short message and evacuate for their own safety.

Marine Communications and Traffic Services (MCTS) currently has 22 centres across Canada. The Coast Guard announced today that they will be closing 10 centres. Approximately 180 of the 350 MCTS officers across Canada will lose their jobs.

Source: Allan Hughes, RD Pacific CAW Local 2182

Note: At the same time, the federal government is spending billions of dollars on airplanes for the military. Check out sixthestate’s post for a breakdown of those costs or this post from the 3D’s blog.

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Flashback Friday: 50 years of Brick Making on Gabriola Island

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If you stand on Brickyard Beach on Gabriola Island and look straight ahead you can see Mudge Island or if you look down you can see the remains of millions of old bricks. Did someone dismantle an old brick house? How did so many bricks wind up on this beach?

Gabriola Island Museum is featuring an exhibit called More Than Just Clay and Mortar: The story of the Gabriola Brickyard which opens on May 19, 2012.

Blue and brown shale suitable for bricks were dug from the hillside just above Brickyard Beach. The quarry itself was about 125 feet long and 35 feet high. The shale was crushed and ground to a fine powder, then water was added before being passed through a chute to a hand operated press.  After the bricks were formed they were dried in a drying kiln before being loaded into a firing kiln. There was no electricity on Gabriola Island, so all the machinery was hand operated and the kilns were coal fired.

Brick making was a labour intensive process and it was the main industry on Gabriola from 1900 to 1950.

Source of information: Gabriola’s Industrial Past: The Brickyard by Jenni Gehlbach

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Public Events on Rural Development

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Many people expressed an interest to review the policies relating to subdivision development in rural areas in the Regional District of Nanaimo. All next week you can bring your thoughts on alternatives to conventional subdivision developments. What do you want to see for future land development? Bring your ideas.

The following public events are:

Wednesday, May 23rd – Arrowsmith Hall, 1014 Ford Road, Coombs
4:00pm to 7:00pm – Open House
7:00pm to 8:30pm – Workshop

Thursday, May 24th – Lighthouse Community Hall, 240 Lion’s Way, Qualicum Bay
4:00pm to 7:00pm – Open House
7:00pm to 8:30pm – Workshop

Saturday, May 26th – Cranberry Community Hall, 1555 Morden Road, South Wellington
12:30pm to 3:00pm – Open House
3:00pm to 4:30pm – Workshop

Tuesday, June 5th – Nanoose Community Hall (Library), 2489 Nanoose Road, Nanoose Bay
4:00pm to 7:00pm – Open House
7:00pm to 8:30pm – Workshop

You are also encouraged to visit www.ruraldevelopment.ca and fill out a short survey.

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Mail Art Exhibition at Nanaimo Art Gallery

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Currently,  the Downtown Nanaimo Gallery is featuring 2012 Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts: Mail Art Exhibition until May 22, 2012. What is mail art? It is art sent through the mail.

Artists from 25 countries have mailed postcard sized art to the curator, Ed Varney of Courtenay, on the theme of “Hard Work – Work & Labour.” There are 125 artists from around the world who have mailed in their art and the artworks feature painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, photography and other media.

From rayjohnson.org:

“Mail art began in New York in the 1950s by art professor Ray Johnson and was seen as one of the new “communication arts”, a form of media aesthetics that evolved alongside video art.  It is in this precise sense that mail art could be said to only have “a present” – a present of communicational events, of uncontrollable exchanges, of things arriving and departing at unforeseen times and places, thanks to the medium of postal system, which, just like television, could be seen to distribute “signals” across the boundaries of time and space.”

 

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