That’s how it works with everything. That’s how things get approved.
Whats with this “predicted” BS. Aren’t professionals supposed to use a more reliable method for costing projects besides “predicted”? Those who use the predicted method can pay the extra out of their own pockets!

Rumours I’ve heard they aren’t paying the small contractors for the work done.

pre·dic·tion (pr-dkshn)
n.
1. The act of predicting.
2. Something foretold or predicted; a prophecy.

So they used a little chanting and moaning, and made a guess at the outcome.
So much for project management.
So much for tendering and receiving accurate service quotes.

What the hey, it’s only government money, and there is lots of that.

I just want to throw this out there as a thought. The Liberals, friends of Liberals, ex-liberals have been using Hydro as a cash cow for quite awhile now, re, independent power producers. Hydro was forced to write contracts with these guys of 54-58 billion, that is billions over the next thirty years. Hydro is forced to buy very expensive IPP power over their own much more cheaper power thus our rising power bills.

Now I have a hard time believing these exorbitant rising costs can be so unexpected. I don’t think surveying the geography of the land to be built on is rocket science. Why then the surprise in added drilling and blasting costs. It isn’t as if Hydro has not built powerlines before. Poor oversight, incompetence? Cash cow again?

These rising costs will be most likely be reflected in your power bill using some nefarious excuse, again cash cow for the selected few.

For those against site C, in Hydro’s own words it is required to back up the power from IPP’s because IPP power by its nature cannot be used for base load. The rivers don’t always flow, and the wind is very variable, sometime lots of wind, sometime zero. Over a year very expensive wind power only generates about 30% of its nameplate rating not to mention the birds and bats they kill. Interesting how the greenies are so quiet about that, oil bad, bird mincers good.

Those so called green run of the river power plants, new roads, power line right of ways, washouts, landslides, heavy construction, pristine forests and habitats disrupted. Not a peep from the greenies but Site C is the end of the world.

Like I said before Site C is required to back up the greenie approved how ironic.

So Hwy 37 power line- cash cow, IPP’s- cash cow and Site C still has to be built and that will also most likely also turn into a cash cow. What a deal.

Quebec has nothing over BC in graft. Just my thoughts.

They should have used the logs they sent overseas from the area to build the towers. … after all, it is wood first country … ;-)

To start with, it is impossible to estimate subsurface conditions unless one surveys where each tower and each tower leg is going to be positioned and does some core drilling. With modern technology there may be some easier way of imaging subsurface conditions. Otherwise, one will find out when one gets to actually doing the work.

It is for that reasons that subsurface conditions, when actually found at time of construction, are normally going to determine the final cost. No one will enter into a fixed fee contract for that portion of the work. It is normal to be cost +

So, not very surprising. This is typical of civil work. Perhaps the amount is surprising.

Talk about graft ….. think tree nurseries when you think about graft … ;-)

First off who ever came up,with the numbers should be fired immediately. Second stop all work right now. How can you make such a huge mistake in the cost.
Hydro has gouged us lots..time to stop it. Make Alcan/rio tinto pay full price for the energy they use and give us tax payers the break. We will end up paying for this wether its increased billing, paid by government or both… Plain and simple crooks

You got that right P Val. Hydro is run by less than competent people. Mostly friends of the Liberals.

A mistake like this should warrant the firing of a goodly number of high priced people, not the least of which would be the top dog a Hydro, and the top dogs at the BCTC.

All these high priced projects are being paid for by the tax payers of BC, and its time we started to get serious about not paying anymore tax increases.

The Government and all their entities are totally out of control when it comes to spending money, and they seem not to give a s… about who has to pay for it all.

How can you be 332 million dollars out in your estimate for the project? Someone is getting rich here. This situation is becoming all too common in today’s business world!

I agree that it is incredible that previous estimates were so much lower and that the actual present cost would be so much higher. In the long run (transmission lines last many decades) isn’t BC Hydro going to reap increased profits by increased power sales when industrial development starts to happen in that area?

Isn’t that how the country was initially developed by the building of railroads and highways?

This area is basically hindered by the lack of sufficient and reliable electricity! So do we want development or not?

Too bad we don’t have a person with the visionary qualities of a W.A.C. Bennett.

Palopu, BCTC no longer exists.

“Too bad we don’t have a person with the visionary qualities of a W.A.C. Bennett.”
——————————————-
Too bad, indeed, Prince George. But we don’t. Not only that, but the world that WAC Bennett lived in has changed. A lot of what worked then in regards to the benefits of development can’t be duplicated now.

The one thing that set WAC Bennett years ahead of any of his successors, his own son included, and all the other Premiers we’ve had since, was his understanding of FINANCE.

He understood ‘accounting’ and what the figures with the $ signs in front of them really meant. And wasn’t ever shy about being creative in using it. For the benefit of ALL British Columbians, not just a favoured few.

It’s too bad for all of us that ‘age’ caught up with him in his last term or office, and he wasn’t able to convince British Columbians of the dangers of inflation, nor propose a method to control its worst effects. And enable a genuine ‘prosperity’ in place of it ~ for all. Something which, for all his visionary qualities, and the hard work of hundreds of thousands of British Columbians who labored to make that vision a reality, we were surely entitled to.

Speaking about the ‘visionary qualities’ of WAC Bennett, when he was Premier he recognised that hydro-electric development was for the purposes of providing plentiful, low-cost electricity to BRITISH COLUMBIANS.

BOTH residential and industrial customers. That BC had an under utilised ‘natural advantage’ which development could harness for the actual, or ‘physical’, benefit of ALL our citizens, and this would be REFLECTED ‘financially’. As it should be. Always.

The ‘figures’, in other words, would FOLLOW the ‘facts’. Not precede and determine them, which will NEVER work.

What has happened since? We might care to recall that Dave Barrett’s NDP DOUBLED the cost of electricity to BC industrial power users shortly after his government succeeded Bennett’s.

That was the beginning of the wipe-out of our ‘natural advantage’.

It WASN’T ever restored by the so-called Socreds under Bill Bennett, and later Bill Vander Zalm.

When the opportunity arose to do so under Glenn Clark, when we could’ve taken our rightful share of the ‘downstream benefits’ under the Columbia River Treaty ~ the power we didn’t need in the 1960’s and 70’s, the power that WAC Bennett said we’d get “…for free, and nothing is freer than ‘free’, my friend” in the future, when we would need it ~ the NDP opted to sell it to the Americans instead.

While WE paid higher hydro-electric power rates here in BC.

And Gordon Campbell? He was as ‘money’ hungry as the NDP, if anything even more so. For our power costs have risen steadily ever faster since his mob and now Christy’s have been in office.

And now the Americans are balking at paying what they’ve been paying for the power we’ve been selling them? Take it back. As ‘power’. Forget about their God-damned ‘money’, which is rapidly becoming worthless anyways. Take it back and restore the ‘natural advantage’ that is rightfully OURS by LOWERING power rates to ALL British Columbia users. Stop penalising us for what should be the key, or one of them, to our ACTUAL ‘prosperity’. And let the ‘figures’ again REFLECT the ‘facts’ ~ not the other way around.

In 1985 I picked up a book at the Hudson’s Bay – Conversations with W.A.C. Bennett. I didn’t know I had it until I stumbled upon it last year! It’s a terrific read and I paid only 59 cents for it!

” ~ the NDP opted to sell it to the Americans instead.” I recall that the NDP didn’t get paid for some of it and had a lawsuit against it from the US – the billion dollars annually the NDP included in the two last budgets went AWOL and that is what contributed to the fudgit budgets calamity!

Good post socredible.
This “skyrocketing costs issue” is kind of amusing other than we are going to pay through the nose for it.
No doubt that a bunch of cooked book estimates were used but there is more too this.

I think of the example of how thieves were stealing whatever the crooks at the scrap yards would buy. Not until it was realised that they were also stealing BC hydro’s equipment that anyone in government woke up to make an attempt to stop this with laws and a bit of enforcement. Well wakey wakey to the BC and federal governments as guess why not just this project but every project is meeting a wall of extraordinary cost increases.

The never ending increases in complicating of every imaginable facet of doing things is causing the enormous increases to the costs to everything. The time it takes to do something costs more as does the costs of the systems of regulations and impediments that business and individuals are being forced to adapt and comply with. Things that are so called in the name of safety or in the name of environment or human rights or statistical reporting or registrations and licencing and numerous other things is making everyone crazy. You pretty much need a ticket to poop and your employer better know you have this ticket that might expire before the end of the day.
No doubt accidents will decrease when people are in a safety meeting for half of the day and nothing moves and good chance no one will be hurt. But very little gets done and if it gets done chances are some rule is being broken.

If you watch any project or jobsite or workplace that is going on these days, and you have any understanding of productivity or efficiency, then with few exceptions are you impressed with what is actually being accomplished.
The average new worker of today wouldn’t have been kept for a day 20yrs ago or one hour 30yrs ago and there are some important reasons for this loss of productivity. It is actually the loss or complete absence of the goal being productivity.

There is an obvious reduction in the number of the people who are motivated as well as the available or applied use of talents everywhere you look, in business, in services and individual workers and something is causing this. People are far more educated on average and yet try to find a practical approach to anything. Try to find something that can be done with simple straight forward common sense without first being trained by someone and filling out a form of some sort and then handing it to a dozen people before it can be approved. All that because the white shirts are off the hook for it being supposedly safely done according to a procedures manual. It seems that 90% of the highest paid “educated workforce” is in some sort of dummyproofing bubble trying to slow or stop the 10% of the low paid “working grunts” from doing anything. Young entry level workers know no better but for people who have been around for 20+ years in the working world it has turned into a very unstimulating and demoralising thing to participate in a workplace when everything that needs to happen cannot happen because of the endless nonsense. Unions used to be the famous designers of these quirky things to protect jobs but what our governments and big business have put in place is worse. Funny how that works.

For the most part the fun in working is gone, the sense of true and personal accomplishment is gone, the desire for excelling at the art and craftsmanship of an occupation is gone and hence the lower productivity and quality of almost everything.

I couldn’t agree more, foresight. “Common sense” is being destroyed before our very eyes, and with it the ‘individual producer’, and the last vestiges of what could be called human scale ‘free enterprise’.

My own belief is that this is just what FINANCE, and the elite that controls it at its upper echelons, want. A move towards ‘monopoly’, in every field possible, for the ease of control it gives THEM.

That the plethora of inane rules and regulations that are multiplying exponentially have precious little to actually do with safety, or preserving the natural environment, or even in making life more pleasurable for the majority of us. Or anything else that’s sensible.

They’re designed to put us in debt, and keep us there. And thereby “under control”. If a better world were the result of that kind of external control, one could possibly see the sense of it. But when virtually everything costs more and is worse, year after year….? And what comes next makes it even more so…?

I’m certain that’s NOT the kind of world WAC Bennett wanted, nor any of the real ‘Social Crediters’ that made up his government. It seems to me that there’s really no substantial difference between the BC Liberals, who at their very best are only fighting, (and losing, perhaps purposefully), a rear guard retreat from the principles of free enterprise they pay lip-service to when they say they stand for them, and their so-called opponents in the NDP.