City of North Vancouver to scrap ship's stern

The stern of the HMS Flamborough Head is nearly sunk.

After being granted a reprieve from demolition by City of North Vancouver council in January, council voted Monday night to carry on with original plans to scrap the stern.

The stern, which has sat in various spots on the waterfront since 2001, was intended to be incorporated into the National Maritime Centre. When that project fell through in 2008 because the province pulled financial support, the Flamborough Head remained without a clear purpose.

When an independent engineer inspected the structure holding the stern in August last year, the report noted that the cradle was showing signs of degradation including rotting timber that was never large enough to be permanent, and a shifting of the cradle. The report concluded council should treat addressing the failing structure as a four out of five on its urgency scale, based on the moderate risk posed to the public. Council voted behind closed doors in September to spend up to $250,000 to decontaminate and dismantle the remains of the ship that was built just meters away.

When that became public knowledge in December, it prompted the formation of Save Our Stern, an amalgam of various heritage groups with the aim of keeping the stern on Lot 5 as a memorial to the shipbuilding that once happened there.

Council agreed to hold off on the work and ask Roger Brooks, the consultant leading the waterfront revisioning process, to see how it could be included in any future plans for Lot 5, though Brooks concluded the only spot for it would be on the other side of Lonsdale Quay, in Waterfront Park. Council members called that a "non-starter."

Keeping the stern would cost at least $2.4 million according to city staff's report, on top of the $1 million already spent acquiring the ship's hull and engine, moving it around and maintaining it. The City is also paying $10,000 a month to provide security.

But that cost could be justified if council would make the stern a priority, said Coun. Pam Bookham, who led the effort to save it. Bookham said it still had potential to be used as part of one of the Shipyard's new buildings or otherwise incorporate it into a familyfriendly interactive exhibit. Brooks' vision, she said, was too similar to the ones he had done for other cities, drawing a comparison to Seattle's waterfront ferris wheel and the one pitched for the pier on Lot 5. "We need to distinguish ourselves. We can't just duplicate what other communities have done. There's something about the Flamborough Head that sets us apart," she said.

Only Coun. Don Bell voted with Bookham.

For the rest of council, the costs were too high and the ship's time had come.

Coun. Rod Clark suggested much of the community has gotten "used to it" but that wasn't enough to justify keeping it.

"That doesn't make it heritage and that doesn't make it viable. Above all else, I'm a defender of the taxpayers' purse. The

taxpayers have paid through the nose on this one. It's been a bad bit of business and there comes a point where we have to cut out losses and we've come to that point," he said. "The Flamborough Head has had her day."

Coun. Guy Heywood, whose uncle Jimmy worked on the ship, agreed.

"If I remember uncle Jimmy, he would have been appalled at having us pay $1 million for a hunk of metal like this without any kind of cost-benefit or vision of how it was going to make the community better so, with regret, I think we have to give up on this one," he said.

While the stern's fate is largely sealed, staff will bring back one final report on options for saving a portion of the metal and having it reworked into a commemorative piece that will be placed in the Shipyards precinct.