Posts from — February 2010

The city's front line against filth: street, sewer and water workers on the afternoon shift, ready to clean Vancouver's streets, National Yard, 2.30 p.m., Feb. 23.

One of the unsung triumphs of the 2010 Games has been the ability of city workers to keep streets clean when more than 100,000 people a day are crowding the downtown core.

The city’s media outlets began to acknowledge the achievement Saturday, when Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford contrasted the “river of vomit” she saw on her way home with the clean streets she experienced on the way back to work in the morning.

The clean-up work continues 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The afternoon shift is made up of about 180 city workers drawn from sewer, water and streets departments, who are ferried to locations around the downtown core to bag and stack garbage, which is accumulating at twice the regular rates.

Between 10 and midnight, an equally-large graveyard shift hits the streets to pick up the stockpiled litter while water trucks flush downtown lanes. The engineering department’s achievements occur under cover of darkness, but the results are obvious to all when the sun rises.

(Their efforts are back-stopped by special crews retained through Vancouver Coastal Health and United We Can.)

If street clean-up was an Olympic event, these folks would be gold medalists.

A CBC interview in which I said once more what I have been saying for months — that it’s time to consider the possibilities of a new north False Creek neighbourhood with good traffic links where the Georgia Viaduct now stands — has provoked an uproar from CBC News readers.

Missing from the debate is the hard information the city needs to gather in the coming months as part of a study of the viaduct’s future. In the meantime, I hear anecdotally that neighbourhoods east of the viaducts are much calmer, as might be expected.

Despite contract restrictions that limited her ability to boast about her installations in the Olympic Village, Wells artist Claire Kujundzic got out under the radar to land this coverage in today’s Globe and Mail. The work in the Salt Building echoes the damage done by mountain pine beetle.

Meanwhile, Olympic resisters have thanked BC Civil Liberties Association director David Eby for his criticism of last week’s violence with a pie in the face.

Why? Some claim Eby violated undertakings not to criticize Olympic protesters, an odd echo of the VANOC efforts to keep signage limited to “celebratory” messaging.

VANOC, meanwhile, has asked the CBC, our national public broadcaster, not to distribute Canadian flags with the CBC logo on the back. Strangely, the CBC agreed.

On the bylaw enforcement front: city enforcement officers report nearly 100 percent verbal compliance with city sign bylaws and a level of violations that amounts to background noise.

The Cape Pine, anchored in False Creek.

The venerable Cape Pine,a 60-year-old veteran of BC’s fishing industry, dropped anchor in False Creek Thursday directly across from the city’s Live City Yaletown site at David Lam Park.

The Pine, a reminder of the resource and manufacturing industry’s that used to drive BC’s economy, seems out of place in today’s condo-ringed Creek. Built in the United States during the Second World War as a submarine chaser, the vessel was part of the Canadian Fishing Co.’s salmon and herring packing fleet, back in the days when we had a fishing industry.

Today, however, the Pine packs well-heeled tourists, six at a time.