THE WEDNESDAY
CANADIAN COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER AWARD 2012
TRI-CITY NEWS Pushing for Change
Hope set to music
SEE LIFE, PAGE A16
SEE ARTS, PAGE A26
MAY 9, 2012 www.tricitynews.com
INSIDE Tom Fletcher/A10 Letters/A11 A Good Read/A17 Sports/A30
Reminder for grads Students at Dr. Charles Best secondary school in Coquitlam celebrated Road Safety Awareness Day on Tuesday with a bang — albeit a fake one. A mock car crash was set up on Como Lake Avenue in front of the school in order to give the several hundred students who witnessed the event an idea of what a real emergency looks like. Drama students covered in fake blood were sprawled out across the road before emergency crews attended the scene, shortly after 10 a.m. “Always at this time of year, our thoughts turn to the safety and well-being of our students, especially our graduates,” said Best principal Mary O’Neill. “We decided to host this vivid demonstration in order to bring home to our Best community the importance of safe and responsible behaviour while driving.” Car crashes still lead the way in preventable causes of death among young people and Coquitlam RCMP said the purpose of this year’s mock crash is to raise awareness. GARY MCKENNA/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Insurance costs shut PoMo’s Flavelle mill By Sarah Payne
IN QUOTES
THE TRI-CITY NEWS
The Flavelle sawmill in Port Moody has had to shut down because of soaring insurance premiums in the wake of two fatal sawmill explosions in B.C.’s Interior. F lavelle Sawmill Company’s Mill and Timber Products Ltd. went from paying about $300,000 annually to just over $1 million, according to news reports, and that hike only compounds problems for a company already strug-
MIKE CLAY
“There’s lots of discussion that’s taken place around that site in the last 20 years.”
gling with flagging markets. Following fatal explosions at Babine Forest Products in Burns Lake and another in Prince George, WorkSafeBC has ordered all sawmills in the province to inspect their premises
for dust build-up. Heavy dust build-up has been widely speculated to be the cause of the explosions, mainly due to processing the tinder-dry pine beetle wood. see NO RISK RISK,, page A13
Coq. is bearing down on garbage scofflaws By Diane Strandberg THE TRI-CITY NEWS
C o q u i t l a m ’s n e w urban wildlife co-ordinator said he’s cautiously optimistic that there will be fewer bears around to get into garbage this year because several young cubs whose mothers were killed are no longer in the area. The seven cubs are living at the Critter Care Wildlife Society facility
BEARS+MATH=DEATH Please see editorial on page A10 in Langley and will be released into the wild this spring, where they will eat natural foods instead of learning how to get into garbage, a prime reason many bears get destroyed each year. But Drake Stephens
said other bears may still wander into the TriCities if people don’t make an effort — now and through to fall — to lock up their garbage and secure other bear attractants. This is the time of year when sows typi-
cally send their cubs out to fend for themselves, Ste phens said, and “when they get kicked out by mom, they can become problems.” The weather will also d e t e r m i n e wh e t h e r there is a good supply of natural food; if food supply dwindles, more bears may hike down from the mountains into urban greenbelts. see ENFORCEMENT, O C , page g A133 also: HOW THEY VOTED, A3