Thursday - April 11, 2024 - Highway dreams

🌧 High 9C

Good morning!

We have made a lot of jokes about replacing one Grace with another over here. And I would like to just state, for the record, that the first time I saw this job posted was on Original Grace’s Twitter. And I thought: “Hey I like the Fraser Valley. Wouldn’t it be so funny if…” Turns out it was, in fact, funny. If a little confusing at times.

– Grace Giesbrecht

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

A transport wishlist from
Chilliwack, Hope, Agassiz and Harrison

It takes a lot to get Harrison Hot Springs council to unanimously agree on anything. It takes an even more serious situation to get a councillor from one side of Harrison’s political divide to thank an opposing council member.

But Rockwell Drive will do that. This week, Harrison’s council unanimously voted to ask the province to post warning signs, remove a chunk of mountainside, and reinforce the Harrison lakeshore to address safety concerns on the narrow road.

The need for road improvements wasn’t just raised at last week’s council meeting. The road also features among two dozen other priority transportation improvements cited in the Fraser Valley Regional District’s new regional growth strategy. Rockwell Drive is joined there by an array of other projects where safety concerns dominate—including two Fraser River crossings and a pair of one-way-out emergency corridors.

• Yesterday, we looked at eight projects identified in the growth strategy and located in Abbotsford and Mission. Today, we look at those further east in the Fraser Valley.

Related

Need to Know

🏳️‍🌈 BC’s Human Rights Commissioner says Chilliwack is experiencing a troubling rise in anti-LGBTQ2S+ incidents [Chilliwack Progress]

🚔 Shots were fired in Willowbrook in Langley around 3:30pm yesterday [Global]

💧 BC has its lowest snowpack in more than 50 years and the province’s drought is expected to worsen [CBC]

🌬️ A new Canadian study says fans are not effective at cooling human body temperatures when the weather is hotter than 33 degrees [Castanet]

🌲 The BC Building Code will start allowing mass timber buildings up to 18 storeys high [CTV]

🔥 No one was injured in a fire on Othello Road in Hope Tuesday morning [Hope Standard]

🩸 An Abbotsford plasma donation clinic more than doubled its goal [Abbotsford News]

🥓 The Food Truck Wars festival will be held in Langley for the third year [Langley Advance Times]

🚑️ A man was taken to the hospital after a hit-and-run in Mission [Mission Record]

👉️ Chilliwack school board will present its budget next week [Chilliwack Progress]

👮‍♂️ A five-year-old who went missing in Chilliwack was found 14 minutes after police announced the search [Chilliwack Progress]

📦️ Two Lower Mainland Amazon warehouses are trying to unionize [CTV]

🏚️ The Langley Heritage Society is restoring a 100-year-old barn in Yale Park [Langley Advance Times]

📷️ CURRENT CAM: No one had guessed yesterday’s Current Cam location as of 5pm yesterday. Check out the picture and try again here. Hint: The scene is easily visible from a local highway.

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The Agenda

What’s under Hope’s ice rink? 

There’s an excavator digging up the ice rink at the Hope & Area Recreation Centre. But don’t worry, it’s supposed to be doing that. The recreation centre is undergoing significant upgrades this spring, including a revamp of the arena’s 50-year-old refrigeration system. 

The previous system piped ammonia through tubes in the concrete to cool the surface that formed the floor of the ice rink. Water poured on top of the slab would then freeze, creating the base for the ice surface. Ammonia ice plants can be hazardous if they leak. There have been three ammonia leaks at ice rinks in BC since 2017, none of which have been in the Fraser Valley. Three people died at one such incident in Fernie in 2017.

The Fraser Valley Regional District will be replacing Hope’s aging ammonia ice plant with a new carbon dioxide ice plant and gas cooler. CO2 plants are becoming more popular in recreation centres because it is easier to recapture the heat produced during ice-making. The FVRD will be installing a recovery system at the Hope recreation centre to take some of the heat produced by the ice rink and move it into the pool. 

The upgrades are funded through a variety of provincial and federal grants, and will also include a replacement concrete slab and pipes for the ice rink, as well as updated electrical infrastructure.

The upgrades are underway and are expected to have minimal impact on future ice time at the rink.

🗓 Things to do this week/end

🎸 Tribute concert: Abra Cadabra, an ABBA tribute act, will perform at the Clarke Theatre in Mission on Friday, April 12. Details online.

🛶 River race: The CCE Paddling Club hosts its annual Rich Weiss Memorial Race at Tamihi Rapids Sunday, April 14 at 10am. Racers of all experience levels welcome. Details online.

🤼 Wrestling smack-down: An all-star wrestling competition will take place at the Abbotsford Arts Centre on Saturday, April 13. Details online.

Want even more? Insider members get a comprehensive events listing every Thursday, plus a weekly Saturday round-up edition with behind-the-scenes content. Becoming a member costs less than $2 a week and helps support the ongoing production of The Current’s newsletters and in-depth journalism. Become a member here.

Have an event to tell us about? Fill out this form to have it highlighted here.

Catch up

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