The Prince (George
Citizen
 MONDAY, APRIL 29,1991
 51 CENTS
                                                                              (Plus GST)
 The population bomb__________6
 Gangs go on rampage__________7
 Stars, Oilers advance_______11
 Questions surround Mozart 14
                                                                    TELEPHONE:
                                                                      562-2441
                                                                       CIRCULATION:
                                                                          562-3301
     READY FOR RECYCLING?
     Prince George residents have less than two weeks to top off their collections of old oewpapers for recycling.
     The Recycling Action and Environmental planning Society is holding its second recycling day May 11 at all four Overwaitea locations in Prince George. Collection will take place between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.
     There is really only one rule those planning to drop off newspaper have to follow, says REAPS president Sallie Dabb.
     “The first thing they have to do is remove any glossy flyers.”
     Glossy or shiny paper cannot be recycled with newsprint.
     Participants don’t have to worry about bundling the paper, Dabb said. Organizers will have proper containers and forklifts on hand to help get the newsprint ready for transport.
     As it did last year, Overwaitea will supply the trucks to take the newsprint to a recycling plant in Vancouver.
     In 1990 REAPS collected 31,000 kilograms of newspaper, some from as far back as 1963, and turned a profit of $777.
     Anyone interesting in helping on collection day can call Dabb at 562-0806 or Holly at 962-5897.
  Last-ditch deal averts pilot strike
                   Citizen news services VANCOUVER — A contract settlement one hour before a strike deadline averted a walkout by Air BC pilots on Sunday.
  The tentative agreement, which covers the 276 pilots of Canada’s largest regional carrier, came at 2 a.m. The pilots were set to strike at 3 a.m.
  Talks had broken off Friday but a non-stop bargaining session that began Saturday afternoon led to the settlement.
  Pilots’ Ed Mack said the tentative agreement is for 20 months, but declined to give further details pilots have ratified it. The vote is to be conducted by mail and could take a month.
  Mack said officials of the Canadian Air Line Pilots Association are recommending acceptance.
  With the threat of a strike now over, it’s “business as normal,” Mack said.
  Air BC operates four flights out of Prince George Mondays through Fridays, three on Saturdays and two on Sundays.
  “Certain people expressed a great deal of relief’ that a deal was reached without job action, Mack said.
  The main issues in the dispute had been wages and retroactive pay. The pilot’s association argued that the $17,400 starting annual salary of an Air BC pilot was significantly behind the industry standard.
  Pilots had been without a contract for 18 months.
  Air BC is 85-per-cent owned by Air Canada and operates throughout British Columbia and Alberta, with flights to Seattle and Portland.
  A spokesman for the company couldn’t be reached.
City man ‘critical’ after plane crash
      Special to The Citizen
   WHANGAREI, New Zealand — A 48-year-old Prince George man is in critical condition in hospital today after suffering serious bums in a plane crash, New Zealand police said.
   Vemon Joseph Prouting, who police said is a Greyhound bus driver in Prince George, escaped from his burning plane after it crashed on takeoff Saturday from his family farm’s airstrip at Mama, 24 kilometres northeast of Whan-garei. Whangarei is north of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island.
   Fire, ambulance and police said Prouting was lucky to survive the accident. He was rushed to Northland Base Hospital suffering from third-degree bums to his head.
   More than 70 per cent of his body was burned in the fire.
INDEX
  Hospital officials described his condition as critical and said there has been no sign of improvement, although he has not deteriorated.
    Police said Prouting planned to fly his twin-engine Piper Apache back to Canada, probably today. He arrived from Canada on April 12 and had been staying with his parents, Trevor and Daphne Prouting, at Marua.
    Daphne Prouting said she was grateful her son managed to survive the fireball explosion after the plane tumbled into scrub at the end of the runway.
    “If it was going to happen, it was better now than him going missing half way across the Pacific,” she said, adding that her son is an experienced pilot with more than 20 years of flying.
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                                                                                                                                                             "It's my first day. I thought this was the staff canteen."
                                                                    Second time
Bridge fire puts loggers out of work
  VICTORIA (CP) — Vandals set fire to a bridge leading to an environmentally controversial forest on west Vancouver Island Sunday, throwing 210 loggers out of work for at least a week.
  The fire on the 90-metre bridge across the mouth of Kennedy Lake, about 50 kilometres south of Torino, was discovered Sunday moming.
  By the time it was extinguished two hours later, a 23-metre span had been destroyed.
  There was no doubt the fire was deliberately set, said Geoff Lyons, acting divisional manager for MacMillan Bloedel. Tires had been put on the bridge to fuel the blaze and empty diesel fuel containers were found in the area, he said.
  “We don’t know who might have done it,” he said. “We can only speculate,”
  But Lyons stopped short of blaming environmentalists for the fire.
  Anne Pavlasek, spokesman for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee spokesman, said the committee doesn’t condone any kind of civil disobedience.
  “We’re certainly concerned about that area, but not to the extent we’d take that kind of action,” Pavlasek said.
  “More than likely, it was one or two people who couldn’t control their anger. There’s always fringe people like that.”
  The bridge was the only access to several logging operations near Clayoquot Sound, including around Bulson Creek.
  The area has been identified by the U.S. environmental group Conservation International as worthy of preservation. The group says it is one of only 16 unlogged watersheds of more than 5,000 hectares on Vancouver Island.
  Clayoquot Sound also houses two other unlogged watersheds — those surrounding the Megin and Moyeha rivers. The Moyeha is within Strathcona Park, but both the Bulson and Megin watersheds are within a tree-farm licence held by MacMillan Bloedel.
  Ucluelet RCMP were investigating the incident but wouldn’t com-menL
  The debate over the future of Clayoquot Sound has triggered confrontations between loggers and environmentals for several years.
  A series of protests, blockades, arrests and even gunshots fired at one environmentalist a few years ago led to the formation in 1988 of the Clayoquot Sound Sustainable Development Task Force.
                                                                                                 Citizen photo by Brock Gable
 The former Prince Electric building will be only a memory after its scheduled demolition today. Firemen were called out to the Second Avenue and Victoria Street building last weekend to put out a fire and again at 6 p.m. on Sunday. The building was one of the army buildings erected here during the Second World War.
   Petro-Can chops staff
  CALGARY (CP) — As many as 300 Petro-Canada employees across the country will lose their jobs, a company spokeswoman announced today.
  Judy Wish said the cuts affect about three per cent of its staff in Calgary and other major centres.
  “I don’t have the breakdown on how many people in different regions will be affected,” said Wish. “Up to 300 positions within one division of Petro-Canada are affected.”
  That is the products division, which involves refining and marketing, she said.
  The layoffs are the company’s second round of wholesale job cuts in under two years.
  Despite coming out of a relatively successful year — with profits jumping to $181 million from $5 million in 1989 — Petro-Canada is being battered by the recession, poor refined product returns and low natural gas prices.
   A reduced workforce and associated cost reductions would make federally owned Petro-Canada more attractive when it goes on the market later this year with its first public share sale.
   The firm is continuing to sell oil and gas properties and expects to trim its portfolio of producing fields in western Canada to about 200 from 450 by the end of 1993.
   Petro-Canada’s last round of wholesale cuts took place in late 1989 and early last year through layoffs, early retirements and voluntary departures. Over those two years, 1,020 employees were let go and another 380 at its subsidiaries.
   That would have brought the overall workforce down to just over 7,300. However, the company gained about 1,500 employees when it bought ICG Propane Inc. of Winnipeg last year and has about 8,900 workers.
   Massive staff cuts are also occurring at Calgary-based Shell Ca-
 nada Ltd. and Imperial Oil Ltd. of Toronto — which along with Petro-Canada are the country’s largest integrated petroleum Firms.
   Shell has earmarked 1,080 jobs for elimination by the end of the year and recently disclosed hundreds more workers wiU be gone by the end of 1992.
   Of the 1,080 already targetted, about 180 employees have already left the company, which had a 7,110-strong payroll at the end of 1990.
   At Imperial Oil, 2,770 workers
 — including 1,060 at its Calgary-based Esso Resources subsidiary
 — agreed to leave the company as part of three programs put in place late last year.
   The Toronto-based firm, which had hoped 3,000 of its 15,000 employees would vacate voluntarily, said layoffs may be in the cards once it takes stock of its staff needs.
 QUAKE IN SOVIET UNION
Mountain ‘fell’ onto houses
  MOSCOW (CP) — A powerful earthquake rocked the Caucasian republic of Georgia in the southern Soviet Union today, killing at least 23 people, injuring 40 others and causing damage to buildings, officials and residents said.
  The quake was near an area that was devastated by the 1988 Armenian tremor.
  Rocks slid off a mountainside onto houses in Chiatura, 30 homes were damaged in Dzhava, and a railroad station in Sachkhere was “severely damaged” by the quake, the Georgian government office in Moscow reported.
  “The mountain fell onto the
 houses,” spokeswoman Marina Starostina said.
   Twenty people were killed in Sachkhere, two in the town of Ambrolauri and one in the town of Kvarchele, said Maguli Gagnidze, a spokesman for the Georgian parliament.
   Valentina Magradze, a telephone operator in Chiatura, said the railway station in neighboring Sachkhere collapsed.
   She said the tremor rocked the post office where she works, smashing windows and upsetting shelves.
   “People are in panic, there is much destruction. No glass is left in the post office building, the
 shelves fell down,” Magradze said.
   “All the people of the town are in the streets, even patients from the local hospital.”
   Lilya Krasnopeyeva of the Soviet Central Seismic Station said the quake measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. The quake’s epicentre was near Ambrolauri, a town of 17,000 about 145 kilometres northwest of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.
   Don Finley of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va., put the Richter reading at 7.2 and said the quake released about four times as much energy as the 1988 Armenia tremor.
 STRACHAN PRAISES PREMIER
Leadership choice hinted
                                                                                                              by Canadian Press
     VANCOUVER — Education Minister Bruce Strachan says he supports Premier Rita Johnston in the race for the Social Credit party leadership — maybe.
     Strachan said Sunday he’ll still evaluate leadership candidates as they become known, but he’s impressed with Johnston’s performance since taking over as premier when Bill Vander Zalm stepped down about a month ago.
                                                                                                        The Socreds have scheduled a
 leadership convention for July 20. There are no declared candidates so far, although Johnston has said she is mulling it over.
   “She has good capacity for understanding how the province works and she’s been an outstanding chairman of the cabinet — which is a big job — and she’s done it very well,” Strachan said.
   “As a matter of fact, she’s done it far better than Bill Vander Zalm ever did.
  Vander Zalm resigned in disgrace after an investigation found he was in conflict of interest over his part in the sale of his Fantasy Gardens theme park to a Taiwanese billionaire.
  Strachan said Johnston’s loyalty to her predecessor is not an issue of leklership but instead shows good character.
  Johnston will also appeal to the interior of the province because of her strong support for regional development, he said.
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