Month: July 2008

Vancouver faces Olympian hurdle as rock slide cuts off vital corridor

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

With reports from Justine Hunter in Victoria, Sunny Dhillon in Lions Bay and Cathryn Atkinson in Squamish

VANCOUVER — It almost cost Vancouver the 2010 Olympic Games five years ago.

Now, the narrow and precarious cliff-side Sea to Sky Highway is coming back to haunt the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee a year and a half before the big event.

Thousands of cubic metres of jagged boulders laid strewn 10 metres high, blocking the vital artery linking Vancouver and Whistler, the Games’ two primary venue cities. The rock slide Tuesday night near Porteau Bluffs south of Squamish is the highway’s biggest in a dozen years. It is expected to shut down the road for five days and has conjured disastrous visions of stranded athletes and tourists during the 2010 Olympics. The cliffs above the highway are geologically prone to weak planes of rock.

Commuters, tourists and businesses are girding for a long wait.

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Stopping the great escapes: Aquaculture firm calls off search for 29,616 rogue Atlantic salmon that may put B.C.’s wild stocks at risk of a dwindling food supply

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Saturday, July 5, 2008

ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

VANCOUVER — A continent away from their native waters, disoriented and out of captivity for the first time in their lives, 30,000-odd Atlantic salmon are roaming free off the British Columbia coast.

Their mass exodus from a pen at Marine Harvest Canada’s Frederick Arm site on July 1 is B.C.’s largest farmed-salmon escape in eight years. It has spawned a government investigation, with Environment Ministry conservation officers combing the site to find out exactly what went wrong.

The company stopped trying to recapture the escaped fish yesterday afternoon, leaving 29,616 fish missing.

“They’re out, they’re free, they’ll be mingling,” said Raincoast Research biologist Alexandra Morton. And it doesn’t bode well for wild Pacific salmon.

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