The Prince George
Citizen
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1989
Bts>
60 CENTS
Low tonight: 5 High Saturday: 8
Ann Landers............25
Bridge.................39
Business............10-11
City, B.C..........2,3,20
Classified..........35-42
Comics.................30
Crossword...............36
Editorial...............4
Entertainment ... .28-30
Family..............25,27
Horoscope..............39
International ..........9
Lifestyles..........25,27
Movies ................28
National ............8,12
Sports..............13-17
Television ............37
I
ncluded
nside
TITE
Alberta the loser?
8
Series'must go on' 13 Charlie Brown is 40 30
TELEPHONE: 562-2441
BEARS WORRY RURAL PUPILS' PARENTS
Fraser-Fort George Regional District directors want better service for busing rural children to school.
Three directors complained at Thursday’s meeting about three different areas in the region where children and parents must fend for themselves.
In the West Lake area five children on the West Lake Estates side of the lake must walk more than three kilometres on Blackwater Road to get to the bus.
“With bears reported in the area, concerned parents are signing a petition requesting the bus route be changed to include the five students. It would only take an extras 10 minutes or so,” said director Harvey Clark, director for the Chilako River-Necha-ko area.
Another complaint concerns 11 students living in Azu Village in the Pine Pass.
Director Jim Scott, representing Crooked River-Parsnip area, said these students must find their
own way to travel about 25 miles to the Mackenzie Junction to catch the school bus coming from the McLeod Lake area into Mackenzie.
Parents in the Siclair Mills-MacGregor area to the east of Prince George have yet to resolve a two-year battle with the school board regarding busing students to Upper Fraser Elementary School.
“We’re back at square one from where we started (negotiations) with the school board two years ago,” said director Irwin Stoll, representing Willow River-Upper Fraser area.
Parents are doing the best they can, but children are missing too much school, Stoll said.
He charges it makes no difference what the board’s set busing policies are because it “switches them to its own purpose anyway.”
Directors voted to bring the busing matters before the school board shortly in hopes changes can be made before winter sets in.
$8.9-MILLION PROJECT
Chemical plant to expand here
by KEN BERNSOHN Staff reporter
B.C. Chemicals Ltd. announced today will spend $8.9 million in Prince George to turn a byproduct of the kraft pulping process into a commercial product used as a raw material in a number of common chemicals.
The product, toll oil, is skimmed from cnemicals used in processing pulp, and can be sold for the manufacture of adhesives, resins, paper sizing, as a raw material for the paint industry and in reprocessing asphalt.
B.C. Chemicals, which is jointly owned by Canfor and Northwood Pulp and Timber, now produces sodium chlorate which is used at pulp mills in the bleaching process. Crude toll oil, which used to be shipped elsewhere for further processing, is also produced in the process.
The crude toll oil has little market, so it has been taken back to mills to be burned as fuel.
After the upgrading, the toll oil will be a higher grade, and will bring in additional revenue.
The company is receiving a $1.64
Quake death toll estimate lowered
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -Death-toll estimates shrank but tensions and frustrations grew as northern California tried to regroup from a devastating earthquake and unnerving aftershocks that continued today.
A moderate aftershock at 1:13 a.m. registered 3.9 on the Richter scale, said Rick McKenzie at the Seismographic Station at the University of California at Berkeley. It was felt north and south of the city, but the epicentre was not immediately known.
Damage estimates by the state Office of Emergency Services rose to well over $4 billion. A private economist, Frank McCormick of Bank of America in San Francisco, said damage is likely to reach $10 billion. An estimated 12,550 people were displaced, 10,000 in hard-hit Santa Cruz County, the agency said.
In some towns, residents said they were too afraid to sleep indoors because of the Earth’s unrest.
"I can’t stop shaking,” said Mar-celina Toussaint, 73, of Watsonville, a town near the epicentre of Tuesday’s magnitude-6.9 quake and hit by four strong aftershocks Thursday.
“I guess I’m surviving, but I’m scared.”
Spirits weren’t much higher in Oakland, where the task of uncovering cars and trucks crushed in the collapse of a two-kilometre stretch of Interstate 880
continued with no signs of survivors.
Lieut. Kristina Wraa of the Oakland police said today 167 people were still unaccounted for all over the city. It was assumed that many of them were buried in the rubble of 1-880.
No Canadians were reported dead or injured, said the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco.
Rescuers said they were finding fewer cars than feared under the highway, known as the Nimitz Freeway. Some credited the World Series with reducing Tuesday evening’s rush-hour traffic by drawing baseball fans to television sets.
See also pages 2, 9
million low-interest loan from the federal and provincial governments toward the expansion.
“B.C. Chemicals is currently using its CTO (Crude Toll Oil) production largely to fuel pulp mill operations — a gross under-utilization of a valuable resource,” said Federal Forestry Minister Frank Oberle in announcing the loan today.
“This expansion will allow the company to produce higher grade CTO and pitcn.”
Provincial Environment Minister Bruce Strachan commented, “B.C. Chemicals is incorporating depitching technology from a North Carolina firm, enabling the company to turn a waste product into a value-added commodity for export.”
The pitch removed in the new processing can be sold for paving and asphalt roofing tiles.
It can also be used for additional value added products, and B.C. Chemicals is now looking at adding additional processing later, said company spokesman Bob Wiseman.
The provincial government is now testing toll oil pitch on a highway near Quesnel.
The B.C. Chemicals opertion will be unique in North America, according to the company. Production is expected to start next summer and will bring in about $3 million a year in additional revenue.
On another development front, a possible 70-million pound per year expansion of the hydrogen peroxide plant now under construction in Prince George will be discussed by the board of directors of FMC Corporation at their Oct. 27 meeting.
CHOPSTICK PROPOSAL
Factory 'on hold'
by BERNICE TRICK Staff reporter A proposed $4.5 million chopstick factory for Prince George is running into a money snag.
Mayor John Backhouse, representing the city on the Fraser-Fort George Regional District board, told a directors meeting Thursday the province seems reluctant to support Daesung Canada Ltd.’s application for financial assistance, even though it has supported two similar projects in B.C.
I.H. Kim, general manager of Daesung Canada, today confirmed
HERMAN
00200
"I want you to take a half-hour walk, every day, 10 minutes before lunch."
Backhouse’s statement.
“Yes, we have a problem,” said Kim from Vancouver. “It’s a little difficult to get a loan.” Kim added that the project, which would employ 100 persons here, is “on hold” right now.
“We’re at a critical stage. If we can’t get money from the government we’ll have to reconsider going ahead with the project.”
He said the problem is the government has just assisted similar
Slants at Dawson Creek and Fort (elson, so there is no readily available money for Prince George for a few months.
The government will make a decision on the application by the end of November, according to Kim.
At Thursday’s meeting. Backhouse implied the province of Alberta is somehow involved, but did not elaborate on his statement that “Alberta is consistently trying to steal industry from this province.”
But chairman Colin Kinsley says because Alberta has a more liberal grant program and more agressive program for economic development, it’s always waiting for an opportunity like this.
“Don’t worry. If B.C. won’t give money, Alberta will be quick to offer,” said Kinsley.
In the meantime, regional district directors intend to meet on the matter with Elwood Veitch, B.C. minister of regional development, when he visits here Monday.
INTERIOR UNIVERSITY
Go slowly, says UBC head
by BEV CHRISTENSEN Staff reporter
UBC president and vice-chancellor David Stangway supports the drive for an interior university but says it should be developed slowly and carefully.
During an interview in Prince George today, he explained he is a strong supporter of an interior university.
“But it must walk before it can run,” he said.
His support is dependent on the interior university being given enough money to establish creditable programs without draining money from B.C.’s three existing public universities and provided it doesn’t duplicate first- and second-year university programs offered at the College of New Caledonia.
We don’t want to “spread the
mediocrity” that already exists in B.C.’s post-secondary education system by draining money from the existing universities, he said.
B.C. must create 15,000 new student places in its universities just to meet the national standard, he pointed out.
- The question then becomes where to put them and UBC has already said it doesn’t want to have any more undergraduate seats, he said.
“The position I take is I will not judge where these places should be and I’m committed to the position a significant number should be outside the Lower Mainland,” he said.
An international credibility must be established before the proposed university can attract research dollars, he said.
Therefore he supports building
up the reputuation of a limited number of undergraduate university programs before trying to establish post-graduate research projects.
“Universities must compete hard to attract the best students into these programs from around the world,” he said.
B.C. is already losing some of its best and brightest students to American universities, he said.
He denies higher costs are prohibiting northern students from attending universities in the Lower Mainland.
“That’s a myth because studies have shown if the family values education the students will go. Australia did away with tuition fees and the socio-economic mix of students attending university did not change,” he said.
Science: Oberle sees flip side
Governments and corporate executives often approve things scientists and engineers develop without realizing their harmful effects, but then get blamed for the results, Prince George-Peace River MP Frank Oberle told the Association of Professional Engineers annual convention in Prince George today.
Oberle cited the global warming trend, or greenhouse effect, as well as the incidence of furons, dioxins and other harmful byproducts of modern technology as legitimate concerns for the public.
“Whether modern science and advanced engineering are able to find solutions to the problems which these symptoms of crisis indicate, no one can say with certainty,” said Oberle. ‘‘(Nor) whether the planet can sustain its precious balance.”
However, he added, the current situation gives engineers a wide scope for creative action in almost every major industry.
He pointed out that Canada, along with other countries, has
adopted “sustainable development” as a framework for public policy decisions, adding that in forestry, more attention is to be paid to the effects of the industry on air, water and wildlife. “There is no end to the challenges facing you,” Oberle said.
“And if you you fail you will face an environment of increasing govemmnet regulation.
“I feel your convention’s theme of responsible environmental engineering is right on target.”
Elementary
engineering
College Heights elementary school principal John Norman places another book on top of a bridge made by students as part of a problem-solving contest for Grade 6 and 7 classes. Also pictured are teadher Barb Osten, who helps students Grant Burgess and Lance Hobbins steady the pile. Student teams built a bridge using drinking straws and straight pins. The winning team, made up of Hobbins, Burgess, Jackie Horkoff, Amanda Rositano, Geoff McKenzie and Troy Fyke, won the competition with a bridge that held 63 kilograms worth of books. The team goes on to represent the school at the District Problem Challenge in Prince George on
NOV. 23. Citizen photo by Dave Milne
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