Trades training Search for skilled workers targets high school students. Page 7 Strike history Labour feud of 1913 still resonates today. Page 12 Striking visuals Theatre company utilizes multimedia in show. Page 3
Raiders win championship Page 24
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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2013
VOL. 25, NO. 59
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City monitoring honeycomb of former mines I
ROad REMainS closed after cavern discovered last week.
By TamaRa Cunningham ThE NEwS BULLETiN
CHRIS BUSH/THe NewS BUlleTIN
Brian Riddel, Pacific Salmon Foundation president and CEO, announced Friday the Pacific Salmon Commission is granting $5 million for the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project to help study chinook and coho salmon production in the Georgia Strait.
Grant boosts Salish Sea research project By KaRl yu ThE NEwS BULLETiN
A joint research project aimed at studying salmon mortality numbers in the Salish Sea will get a large cash injection in the form of a $5 million grant. The Pacific Salmon Commission will provide funding to Vancouver-based Pacific Salmon Foundation and Seattlebased Long Live the Kings for their Salish Sea Marine Survival Project. The money will be divvied up evenly between the two over the next five years, with $1.8 million granted for early 2014 and $800,000 annually for the
subsequent four years. Brian Riddell, president and CEO of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, said from his organization’s perspective, the project targets three things. “No. 1 is really trying to understand what’s annually determining the production of salmon in the Strait of Georgia,” Riddell said. “If you’ve been here for awhile, you know that the chinook and coho production is way down and sockeye and pink are all over the place, quite variable in that and there’s something going on, very local, that we really don’t understand yet.”
Other goals of the project are recovery of local chinook and coho populations, and restoration of fishing for economic and recreational purposes. Salmon numbers have been on the decline despite a resurgence in coho and chinook in 2013. Research still needs to be done to understand why. “What we do know is that from all the various pieces put together, it very much looks like the highest mortality rates occur in the first four to six weeks when they go to sea and that’s the critical period we need to understand,” Riddell said. u See ‘RESEARCH’ /6
The Harbour City’s network of underground coal mines could be slowly collapsing, according to Nanaimo city staff members. Nanaimo work crews discovered a two-storey deep coal mine cave-in beneath the surface of Pine Street during preparation work for a sewer and water line replacement two weeks ago. They have temporarily closed the street because of the threat of a sinkhole and are investigating options to fill the void without hurting the stability of the mine in other areas. According to city staff, this is not the first time the City of Nanaimo has come across a collapsed 19th century mine, but it is more extensive. Around 2006, city crews filled a small hole with cement that had broken through the surface after a collapse in the same area. Susan Clift, the city’s director of engineering and public works, says the municipality believes a lot of the century-
old mines are starting to disintegrate, leaving voids beneath the surface. While most of the mines are on private property, it becomes a concern for the City of Nanaimo when tunnels are shallow and holes open close to the surface in public areas, she said. Caverns only a few metres beneath the surface have the potential to create sinkholes. Old coal company maps and residents’ accounts of mining activity allows city workers to keep track of mines that need to be monitored. Road maintenance crews check for signs of sinkholes, like hairline fractures and holes on road surfaces close to known mines, and city officials require drilling to ensure there are no collapsed mines near infrastructure work. But the information is limited about the state of the mines beneath the surface and remediation is expensive, prompting the City of Nanaimo to only take action on problems it can see. With an anticipation there could be other mine collapses in the future, there are also questions about whether the province should start to bear the cost for helping to repair coal holes. u See ‘RESIDENTS’ /7
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