Now Suddenly the City Of Prince George Says The Time Is Right For The Ice Breaker

By Ben Meisner

    Have you every seen a flip- flop- belly- flop  like the reasons why the City of Prince George has now come up with the idea of using Eco Technologies to break the Nechako ice jam?  

Here is what they had to say:

"Now that river ice experts have determined there is sufficient open water on the Fraser to try to move ice from the Nechako river channel, it will be possible to safely use an amphibious excavating machine.  The unseasonably warm temperatures of the past week have resulted in open water on the Fraser River, creating an opportunity that did not exist before to move ice out of the Nechako.

“The Emergency Operation Centre is pursuing short- and medium-term solutions to the ice jam problem,” said Derek Bates, EOC director. “Now that our ice expert has confirmed that the time is right for moving ice from the Nechako into open water on the Fraser, we can proceed with that short-term solution.”

Last Thursday no one wanted to even look at the machine Paul Laplante uses to break ice jams and had they done so they would have found that he comes highly recommended by any city he has worked for.

It will come as no surprise as well that the ice expert engineer,  at first said Monday,  that the Eco System would not work, but then somehow that story was changed in the matter of a few hours  and any reference was deleted.

Now why would you invest $500,000 dollars in a hot water system  that you have no gaurentees in , or for $50,000 you can break the jam? 10% as opposed to 100% would make sense to most people and why isn’t the city waiting to see if the ice breaker works well enough to be used in future years? For example there were 36 ice floods in the province in 2005, think how much money could have been saved.

But instead of when you mess up, you dress up and you fess up,  the city EOC and Engineers did a spin. Rather than admitting that a stay at home mum had found the machine by doing some research, they chose instead to make it look like they had the idea all along but it wasn’t the right time to act. They should be embarrassed for that conduct.

The ball was dropped so many times in this venture that it is shameful. Now whether it is the ego of the individuals or the fact they were just in over their heads we will have to see.

Had it not been for Jim Whyte of PEP who brought ECO into the picture, just where do you think the EOC would have led us?  The city brass had the information on ECO as far back as last Thursday. Whyte admitted he hadn’t heard about ECO before, but the City had, or at least they now say they did. Strange,  when I talked to their PR guy last week, he told me that the Mayor had just happened by and he had shown him this ice breaker from the information I had forwarded to him.

 Now instead of waiting to see the results of the Ice breaker, the EOC is moving ahead with the hot water release at a now estimated cost of $500,000, which  is $100,000 more than yesterday. If it is a face saving move, please save us the agony.  

We who read Opinion250 will have to find some appropriate recognition for "heidi1555" for finding the machine, because you can rest assured City Hall will not be singling her out for the information that she dug up.

Heidi should be recognized for her find, but instead somehow the powers that be were able to spin her out of the picture, what a pity.

I’m Meisner and that’s one man’s opinion.

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