KAMLOOPS THIS WEEK TUESDAY
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30 CENTS AT N NEWSSTANDS EWSSTANDS EW
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JUNE 9, 2015 | Volume 28 No. 69
TODAY’S WEATHER
Sunny and hot High 32 C Low 20 C
DUST FOR DOLLARS
DEEP VOICE E FROM THE E QUEEN CITY Y
Council column takes aim at Ajax
Young Keiffer Mclean is performing in city on June 20
A8
B1 1 LION-SIZED SIGNATURE
B.C. Lions offensive lineman Campbell Allison adds an autograph to Grayson Peters’ collection during Sunday’s Fanfest celebration at Hillside Stadium. Allison is from Ontario and played college football at Eastern Michigan. He was the Lions’ fifthround pick (41st overall) in this year’s CFL draft. Allison, who turned 23 yesterday, is six-foot-six and 320 pounds and is hoping to crack the Leos’ lineup at training camp, which continues in Kamloops through June 17. B.C.’s first pre-season game is Friday in Calgary. Kickoff is at 6:30 p.m. on TSN2. ALLEN DOUGLAS/KTW
Racist graffiti spurs call to Mounties TIM PETRUK
STAFF REPORTER
tim@kamloopsthisweek.com
Kamloops Mounties are investigating racist graffiti spray-painted on a retaining wall near the Aberdeen home of a young black family. Neighbour Dean Gladue said he noticed the vandalism — the word “nigger” in blue spray paint — on Sunday morning. “You come into our strata and it’s in big, bold blue letters — nigger,” he told KTW. “The sad part is there’s a young black family that lives right across the way from that. I’m sure they can see it from their living room.”
Gladue phoned police and an investigator was in the neighbourhood on Sunday afternoon talking to residents. “There’s only so much they can do and so much they can investigate,” Gladue said. “All they can do is take down the information and make enquiries.” Gladue said residents of his townhouse complex are upset by the racist vandalism. “It’s not just your regular graffiti — it’s a hate crime,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it’s happened. “Hopefully, we can catch this son of a bitch that did this. “I think we need to pull together and make the community realize that we’re not going to tolerate this.”
The investigation is ongoing.
The graffiti in Aberdeen that resident Dean Gladue calls a ‘hate crime.’
COLOUR CONFUSION LED TO SPILL ANDREA KLASSEN STAFF REPORTER andrea@kamloopsthisweek.com
The City of Kamloops nearly identified a problem at its O’Connor lift station in Dallas early enough to prevent a spill of sewage into the South Thompson River. But, as an internal city memo obtained by KTW shows, several early red flags weren’t acted upon, allowing sewage at the Dallas site to build up for more than two weeks and eventually leak into a nearby creek in the fall of 2014. The city waited eight months to announce it had released about 4,100 cubic metres —the volume of two Olympic-sized swimming pools — of effluent into the river. The city’s public admission came in May, when it agreed to spend $20,000 on fish-habitat rehabilitation as a penalty and install an $8,000 sewer alarm system. The memo, written by the city’s humanresources department, was sent to KTW anonymously with the message: “Wanted the public to know what really happened.” According to the memo, utilities staffer Ian Price (identified in the city’s annual remuneration reports as a water and wastewater operator) flagged the lift station for investigation on Sept. 18, only days after another city worker had mistakenly shut off the wrong valve at the station. But, the memo states, Price’s regular supervisor was on vacation at the time and the notice went to utilities crew leader Mike Long, who was filling in. “Long acknowledges later that he may have received it but in the absence of the Supervisor, he was signing time sheets and had a lot of things to do and he missed it,” the memo states. See ONE FIRED, A2
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