Lots of salmon in local creeks By Janis Warren THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Heavy rains this month are allowing salmon to travel as high as Highland Drive on Burke Mountain — an altitude of 600 feet above sea level. “It’s almost unheard of,” said Shane Peachman of Port Coquitlam’s Hyde Creek Watershed Society, who was in the area re-
THE FRIDAY
cently to check out a contractor’s remedial work. He said returns for chum and even coho are back to levels seen four years ago. In Coquitlam last Sunday at the 20th annual Hoy Creek Salmon Come Home festival, attendees also marvelled at the size and the number of the spawning fish teeming in the watercourse.
Hatchery manager Niall Williams said his group doesn’t usually count the salmon returning until after they die but said, “They [have] started to come back in a very big way this year. “They were obviously waiting in the lower sections of Scott Creek and the Coquitlam River and, as soon as the first heavy rains occurred, they moved right up to the
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SEE FACE TO FACE, PAGE 11
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Plenty of salmon are swimming in PoCo’s Hyde Creek. STEVE SMITH PHOTO
hatchery and beyond.” And David Bennie of the Port Moody Ecological Society, which operates Noons Creek hatchery, is also reporting “so far, so good” this month. see MORE RAIN, page 6
OCT. 26, 2012 www.tricitynews.com
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Young teens being lured, says report By Diane Strandberg THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Children as young as 13 are being targeted online by men twice their age and most of the victims are girls, according to the national agency that runs a cybertip line. While media focus on cyberbullying, few groups besides the Coquitlam-based Children of the Street Society have pointed to the problem of online lurers seeking to sexually exploit youth. But a recently published study by the federally sponsored Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP) is re-
School District 43 working on new anti-bullying initiative: see page 4 vealing what many have feared — that predators are stalking younger and younger children, and are using threats, persistence and sexually explicit images to normalize sexual behaviour. The study of 264 cybertips, chat room communications and texts between September 2007 and June 2011 found that in 93.4% of the cases, suspects made specific requests for images or there was a discussion of previously uploaded
images; and 30% of the time, the young person themselves had sent the image to the suspect. “From our preliminary findings, what we are seeing is adult offenders using a variety of ways to manipulate children to increase their compliance in order to sexually exploit them online,” stated Lianna McDonald, executive director of CCCP, on the agency’s website. see STUDY SAYS, page 4
PoMo cops to cost $1M more By Sarah Payne THE TRI-CITY NEWS
COQUITLAM WATER PROJECT
JANIS WARREN/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Workers show off the new water treatment facility in the Coquitlam watershed. The Coquitlam Ultraviolet Disinfection Project is now half complete and will include a new operations and maintenance centre. See story on page 13.
Port Moody will have the same number of police officers in 2013 as it does now but taxpayers could be paying nearly a million dollars more for the municipal force. And a chunk of that will go to personnel-related issues. The PoMo police
board’s five-year financial plan was presented to council Tuesday night, with a request for a $9.4-million operating budget for 2013. The 10.74% jump is an increase of almost $908,000 over the 2012 budget. Almost $600,000 comes from salary increases. see $100K FOR, page 14
Prepare for the elements for Bike to Work Week and beyond. See page 18