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Volume 57 No. 16
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Sentinel
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Northern
www.northernsentinel.com
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
1.34 INCLUDES TAX
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Room for local business to grow
Coast Mountain Board of Education Chair Art Erasmus said that the flushing program has worked well on water quality since the issue was discovered. “If you take the standing water that’s in the pipe and flush it out then the new water from the water supply comes in...and it hasn’t had time to leech any copper and lead into it yet,” he said. He pointed out that this is an issue that exists everywhere in Kitimat with plumbing older than 1990. Northern Health’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ronald Chapman told the Sentinel that the flushing program is internationally accepted as good practice.
Cameron Orr The influx of new people to Kitimat when it comes to the work camps means new challenges for local businesses but also a new opportunity to innovate. Those challenges and opportunities were the centre of discussion at the first Small Business Roundtable, hosted by the Kitimat Chamber of Commerce on March 26. To be the first of many such meetings, about five or six local businesses and community stakeholders sat around the table to share ideas on how the town can benefit from the community’s new economic development. “It’s kind of a missing component of impact management,” said Trish Parsons, executive director for the Kitimat Chamber of Commerce. She explained that about six years ago the Interagency and Social Impact Group was formed to be a proactive force when it came to this changing community. When they formed, the modernization at Rio Tinto Alcan’s smelter wasn’t set in stone, and the Methanex plant and the Eurocan Pulp and Paper mill were both still operating. As the community went through changes the group continued to shift focuses, such as on assisting people who were out of work. “Now that things have started to pick up and there’s more projects on the horizon...another component is the small businesses in the community.” Some of those issues include competing with wages paid to camp employees and retaining staff at local businesses. “The idea with the small business roundtable is to continue to meet and hopefully encourage a few other businesses to participate in it,” said Parsons. Local businesses are also being connected with the work camp, recently at a luncheon for businesses to get a sense of what goes on at the camp and how it works, and a plan is in place for a small trade show to take place at the camp. However for local business to benefit from the work camp there needs to be a proactive commitment. “For instance...if you’re not opening your store until noon on Sunday, these guys are off for the whole day, they’re not going to sit around for four or five hours waiting for a store to open when they can hop on one of the shuttle buses and go up to Terrace to shop,” said Parsons.
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Continued on page 2
Students at Mount Elizabeth Secondary promoted diversity and tolerance with a Day of Pink, and those who dressed in the colour were rewarded during an intermission at last week’s Messapalooza talent show. Cameron Orr
Schools address water quality Cameron Orr A water flushing program has been successful in reducing the amounts of lead and copper in the water supply at Kitimat public schools. On April 6 a joint announcement from the Coast Mountains School District and Northern Health alerted parents that elevated levels of copper and lead was found in test samples of area schools. Those schools affected are Nechako Elementary, Kildala Elementary, Kitimat City High and Mount Elizabeth Secondary School. However, despite the presence of the minerals in the water, it is believed that even without the flushing that it is not expected to produce any adverse health
effects, due to the “sporadic nature of water consumption in the school setting.” It is believed that the source of the minerals is old plumbing. Plumbing installed prior to 1990 is known to leech the material into water that sits in the pipe
dents would only be ingesting just under 50 per cent of the daily tolerable lead intake, taking into consideration all other sources of lead. As for the copper, they say that guidelines more frequently relate copper levels
“The concentrations certainly were not high enough to cause any toxic symptoms.” — which is why flushing the water works at bringing the quality up. In a Frequently Asked Questions document prepared by Northern Health they say that the worst case scenario, developed by the BC Centre for Disease using pre-flush water samples, stu-
to things such as taste and odour, and that there are currently no health guidelines in relation to copper levels in water. “The likelihood of any long term health effects from copper in the drinking water is very low,” the FAQ continues.
Board looks at two week spring break ... page 3