Dear Editor:
I am a 16-year resident in the Moodyville area. I do appreciate that the city is taking some issue with this port expansion project, but it is woefully shortsighted to just pick the brazen BC Hydro announcement to put a 69-kilovolt transmission line down St. Davids Street. Hydro already ran one across Third Street to feed Neptune without telling the residents or the city.
One of the real issues of major concern is the Richardson International expansion of the silos. They plan on building 28 more silos even closer to the residential community. This puts every resident up to Third Street in a potential blast zone in the event of another explosion. In the past decade, there have been 83 grain elevator explosions in the U.S. Most had fatalities and some had seismic events felt up to six-kilometres away. Richardson had just such an event in 1975 requiring mass evacuations of the residents. At that time, longtime residents remember that the city set out safety guidelines to protect the residential community which Port Metro Vancouver and Richardson failed to adopt. .
Grain terminals are one of the most dangerously explosive areas in the port. The North Vancouver terminals are the only ones built right next to residential communities. Take a Google Earth tour of the other port terminals and you have a setback of hundreds of metres from any residential areas. Residents on First Street and Alder are so close they can practically spit on the port. In some of the other explosions, concrete blocks weighing more than 100 pounds were ejected almost a football field away.
Richardson do have options to build on the west side of the terminal but that required some land fill. They rejected that option. They still want to put their potentially risky expansion closer to the community. They seem to care very little about the safety of the residents. Port Metro Vancouver also rejected a western expansion due to environmental disturbance to the fish habitat. What a load of BS!
If they jam the current plan down the residents and the City of North Vancouver's throats, they should be required to carry insurance or post a surety bond in the event that they do experience another explosion.
There will be another shoe that will drop. Once they have doubled their storage they will apply to build a second berth. That will definitely upset the fish! They should put all their plans on the table instead of the present machine-gun diplomacy. Build on the west side and put in another berth all at once now.
Take a drive down Third Street. Go along Low Level Road. Walk the Spirit(?) Trail. The noise is worse; the rail-car shunting is getting worse. The train horn blasts last almost a minute. All the trees are cut down. It's a mess.
Leo Vanderbyl, North Vancouver
