Right Up Your Alley: Kamloops

I'm Recycling, Almost!

My average level of frustration with current council is fairly elevated. I disagree with the notion that just because a particular level of government can do a thing, that it should do that thing. While there are a couple of individual exceptions, the overall bent of the current Kamloops city council is more than a little too nanny-state for my liking.

Nevertheless (I really love that word), the idea of municipal blue boxes is somewhat appealing. The Baker family has collected recyclables for years, and often the children join me on trips to the depot. I would prefer that recycling had been voluntarily adopted by more households, however here we are with a curbside recycling program imposed upon us whether we want it or not. Still, at less than $2 per month the cost is not onerous, and households that can sort and shift enough of their existing garbage output towards the blue bin could actually net out about even.

So, early Wednesday morning I eagerly filled our brand new blue container to the rim with accumulated cardboard, cans, newspaper, and milk jugs, then wheeled it out to the end of the driveway. Much to my chagrin however, recycling pickup hasn't started yet, so after the truck went by I sheepishly wheeled the full container back to the garage.

I know I'm gonna take it in the ear from buddies who complain (as I have) about how over-governed and over-taxed we are. But while my first curbside recycling experience was a disappointment, with apologies to Joey and the gang at Café Primo I think I'm looking forward to doing it again next week, almost!

To share your thoughts about recycling, municipal blue boxes, Kamloops city council, or anything else with Right Up Your Alley: Kamloops readers, click on "Comments" (below).

Arjun Singhs from the Book of Privilege

Well done, Kamloops Daily News, for running a front-page story today about Councilor Arjun Singh's recent post on his Your Kamloops blog.

Mr. Singh provides an explanation in his blog for why he voted against the city council motion to provide Domtar with an extension to its air discharge permit. Council decided to back the Interior Health Authority's letter to the Ministry  of Environment that the extension be approved.

Mr. Singh argued against backing the extension, given that, "If Domtar chose to shut down the Kamloops mill, now or in the near future is probably the best time that could happen."

The councilor says that because Domtar doesn't adhere to a socially progressive charter, it might as well close. He apparently doesn't give a damn about the cost to the community of the 860 jobs that would be lost, or of the enormous spin off benefits created by that payroll, or of the direct materials and services the company consumes locally to sustain operations.

Mr. Singh is either too young, or his family too privileged, to recall the excruciating pain this city experienced during the eighties and early nineties. A combination of high interest rates, economic downturn, and strikes hit our most important employers - resource companies - so hard in the early eighties that it took twenty years for the city to recover; in 1984 the unemployment rate in the Kamloops region hit 20 percent, and it remained between ten and fifteen percent throughout the nineties. Mr. Singh can talk long and loud about record low employment rates and a more diverse economy today, but he should try to keep in mind that a rising tide lifts all boats. Our economy isn't so secure that we should invite Domtar to close, especially over an emissions extension that even the Interior Health Authority supports!

Maybe someone will tell the misspoken (albeit I am sure well-meaning) councilor that the communities where Domtar announced four closures this week - including Gatineau (Quebec), Ottawa (Ontario), Baileyville (Maine), and Edwards (Wisconsin) -  called, and they want their 430 jobs back.

Other communities would love to have this employer; Domtar employees make big coin, and the benefits to Kamloops and other communities are manifold. If Domtar goes, so goes the huge corporate tax burden the company pays the city, after which Mr. Singh will have to look hard to find other tax sources to fund technology junkets and pet social housing projects. Is the city in a better position to withstand the mill closure now than it was twenty years ago? Of course it is. However, Mr. Singh's cavalier musings seem very poorly informed by the kind of personal hardship that so many in this town experienced before the current boom lifted the good ship Kamloops.

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Kamloops, BC: Navel of the Universe

When I returned to Kamloops in 1996, it was unusual for an information technology company to set up shop here. High speed Internet access was very expensive, and for the most, very unavailable in residential neighbourhoods. At the time, and many times since, I've joked with technology associates in larger centers that I moved back to Kamloops, "... because it's the navel of the I.T universe," leaving it up to their imaginations as to exactly what kind of navel I had in mind.

Well,it turns out that I was closer to the truth than I thought. Two recent stories, appearing respectively in the July 21 and August 1 editions of the Vancouver Sun and the National Post, relate that a location west of Kamloops up the Deadman Valley is in fact the Centre of the Universe.

As the Vancouver Sun's Kelly Sioski reports, "the claim was made in 1984 after a Tibetan monk arrived at the Vidette Lake Gold Mine fishing lodge, located on the Hudson's Bay fur-trading trail between Kamloops and 100 Mile House."

The monk had been sent here by his Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku to investigate, then declared a spot, which is now marked by an "x" to be the middle of it all.

If one is lucky, one might might occasionally hear the "sound of singing" at the location; that's a dead give-away for the universal nexus.

It's a fascinating story, which I would love to believe. Do any of you readers know enough about Tibetan beliefs to comment on whether this is the real thing or just an uncorroborated filler for slow news days? Please share your information or opinion with Right Up Your Alley: Kamloops readers; just click on "Comments" (below).

A Lay Reading of Transportation Safety Board's Report on Squamish Derailment

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) released its final investigation report on Wednesday into the Canadian National (CN) train derailment of Canadian National freight train A47151-05 near Squamish, British Columbia, on August 5, 2005.

The report sites a number of contributing factors, including, "safety deficiencies in the Canadian railway transportation system", CN's operation of long trains in the Squamish Subdivision "without adequate consideration of the value of retaining and using local knowledge and experience in the operation of long distributed power trains", and "lack of training and proper supervision" of railway personnel.

Long trains are marshalled (assembled) using a variety of strategies to ensure that tension, weight, and other characteristics are appropriately distributed and maintained along the length of the train. This long train was a Distributed Power (DP) train, meaning the power component consisted of lead locomotives at the head, and remote-control locomotives in the middle of the train. Effective marshalling and power distribution can mitigate the risk associated with longer trains and challenging terrain.

The lead locomotive (the locomotive from which the crew operates) did not have on-board instrumentation to provide crew members detailed information about the status of the remote locomotives. The second locomotive did have appropriate technology on-board, but of course that doesn't help when the crew is in a different locomotive. The previous crew, which operated the train out of North Vancouver, received Distributed Power trouble alarms, but for some reason did not advise the Squamish crew of those alarms. If the previous crew had access to more detailed information about the status of the remote engines (which the second engine could have provided) they may have responded differently, but even without that additional information they should have been alerted to a potential problem with the remote engines. In any event, the Squamish crew that was operating the train at the time of the incident was unaware of the alarms.

Nevertheless, the train's behaviour led the Squamish locomotive engineer to test, then conclude, that the mid-train remote engines were effectively non-functional. From that point the train should have been operated under the more restrictive requirements for conventional trains. As the report states, "A 6700-foot DP train would have no difficulty ascending the grade between Cheakamus and Mons. A conventional train was restricted by bulletin and could not achieve such a train length and still comply with the instructions" (emphasis my own).

When the terrain is flat and the track is straight, having lead locomotives do all the work isn't necessarily a problem. However on this stretch of rail - with sharp corners and differences in elevation - a combination of "pull" from the front and "push" from the middle are necessary to help cars follow the track around corners, rather than through them. With only the lead locomotives pulling from the front, northbound Canadian National freight train A47151-05 stringlined the curve at the accident site (at right), meaning that some of the cars climbed the rail on the inside of the curve because the train was being pulled straight like a string.

Background

After it acquired the former BC Rail system (including the line on which the accident occurred) in 2004, CN moved to improve efficiency by running fewer, but longer trains. Longer trains with remote locomotives are operationally more complex, so CN devised a work process that involved contacting one or more of four road foremen should problems with remote locomotives be encountered while a train was en route. The Transportation Safety Board report describes as these road foremen as,"long service, experienced supervisors responsible for providing training and technical advice on train handling and engine service problems to locomotive engineers". However, the report goes on to describe that, "all four people in the road foreman positions left BCR shortly after the CN acquisition". There is now a single road foreman position in place. The report does not indicate whether the crew operating the train at the time of the accident notified either CN operators or the road foreman once they realized that the remote engines were not loading.

Bad Judgement Loves Company Too

It's obvious that relevant expertise was lost after CN took over BCR, and if that expertise had been brought into the developing situation the derailment and the devastating environmental damage it caused could have been averted. So that covers 1). training and, 2). retaining and using local knowledge. But what about the deficiencies inherent in the "Canadian railway transportation system" identified by the report?

The report states, "it is not the function of the (Transportation Safety) Board to assign fault or determine civil or criminal liability". However, in respect to "safety deficiencies in the Canadian railway transportation system", one might conclude that the risks associated with running long distributed power trains through challenging terrain in the Squamish Subdivision were not adequately assessed.

The Railway Safety Act states, "When a risk assessment is carried out by a company before a major operational change, there is no requirement for the company to provide the risk assessment to Transport Canada (TC)". However, section 1.8 of the report indicates:

No formal risk assessment was performed before CN's decision to operate DP trains, although TC agreed that operating one train per day made the overall system safer as it would minimize the possibility of conflict with the passenger service between Lillooet and Darcy.

Since BCR had operated DP trains in the past according to train handling instructions approved by the former provincial regulator, the British Columbia Safety Authority, CN decided that no formal risk assessment was required when it resumed running DP trains over the territory.

While BCR had operated DP trains in the past, it had discontinued the practice prior to the acquisition by CN. A lay reading of the report suggests that considering CN's failure to retain experts familiar with the challenges of running long, complex trains through the Squamish subdivision, either CN or Transport Canada should have recognized the need for a risk assessment.

A risk assessment might have identified training deficiencies that result in poor situational assessments, and the need to make crews aware of an escalation pathway they should use to seek guidance from an expert when dangerous conditions - such as the failure of remote locomotives - occur. One might guess that an experienced road foreman would have advised this train to simply stop where it was, rather than continuing on its way with only lead engines engaged.

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Greenland icesheet evidence contradicts current climate theory

A new study published in the journal Science this week provides evidence that while Greenland was once covered in a boreal forest similar to modern Canada and Scandinavia, the ice sheet which covers it has actually remained stable throughout periods of global warming when the Earth was much hotter than today.

The study, authored by a team of scientists including University of Alberta glaciologist Dr. Martin Sharp, studied the bottom of mile-deep ice cores retrieved from Greenland's ice sheet in 1981. The "dirty" lower section of the core samples, which had previously been largely ignored, contained the oldest DNA samples ever recovered, from sometime between 450,000 to 800,000 years ago.

The age of the DNA at the bottom of the samples allows scientist to date the age of the ice sheet above it, and this new data contradicts accepted theories that Greenland's ice sheet melted during the Eem Period, the last major warm period between glacial episodes.

Dr. Sharp conceded that using this contradictory evidence, "one could argue" that natural influences (variations in the Earth's orbit, sunspot cycles, variations in solar wind, etc.) could be driving warm conditions today, as in the past.

Other evidence appears to more directly contradict the notion that human activity is solely responsible for recent climate change. Professor R. Timothy Patterson is the Director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre within the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University. His team sampled undisturbed sediment at the bottom of deep fjords along the BC coastline, and concluded that variations in climate conditions over a much shorter period (8,000 years) correlated well to variations in solar activity.

Given the overwhelming consensus that humans are responsible for global warming, how does a lay person evaluate evidence that appears to contradict the popular model? In Kamloops, we see evidence of a changing landscape every time we look outside at the red stands of beetle-kill trees. Is that evidence of climate change, or evidence of a natural, albeit very inconvenient cycle?

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