Open government, Premier Clark? Not when it comes to PavCo. Or Vancouver’s floatplane terminal.

Well, this is a disturbing new twist in a battle that’s left a bad smell over floatplane operations in Vancouver for way too long already.

Business In Vancouver is reporting that the provincial government is refusing to release the independent safety study of the new $22-million floatplane terminal in Vancouver that it commissioned last year.

I’ve got some questions about that, and I’ll get to them in a minute. First, some background.

The business newspaper BiV filed a freedom-of-information request in January asking for the safety report as a bitter battle was playing out over everything from fees for using the new Coal Harbour terminal to how safe its design was.

Months earlier, as the battle hit a fevered pitch, Harbour Air, the province’s biggest floatplane operator, lost a plane at the new terminal’s dock. (The company that built the terminal quickly did its own “independent” study of the dock the plane was tied to and ruled that everything was fine, but that’s another story.)

Harbour Air didn’t move into the new terminal when it opened in early 2011 (and it still hasn’t) because of concerns about the design, safety and exposure of the new terminal to waves and wakes.

But it agreed last November to tie one of its planes up there as part of an engineering test of the terminal; while tied up to the dock, the plane took on water and began to sink — something that had never happened to one of the airlines’ planes, Harbour Air said.

The engineering report commissioned by the province was to have been in the hands of  Jobs Minister Pat Bell by late last year. He has never released it publicly, or said what it concluded about safety and design of the new site.

Now PavCo, the Crown corporation that runs the terminal and the convention centre it is attached to, is refusing to release it too. Business In Vancouver is reporting that its request for a copy was turned down over concerns its release could be “harmful to the financial or economic interests of a public body” and to the “business interests of a third party.”

So much for open government, eh?

The saga of the new floatplane terminal has been a sorry mess.

It began in 2003 when the new convention centre was conceived and the floatplane fleet was told it would be moved to a temporary site during construction.

Talks about plans for a permanent terminal in the new convention centre were rocky. Operators were worried that a single private operator would have a monopoly and that it might charge fees too high to pass along without badly affecting their ticketing prices.

They were especially worried when the newly formed PavCo granted the right to build the private terminal to the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre, a joint effort of Graham Clarke and construction giant Ledcor.

So the companies that operate the planes got together and tried to get approval to build their own permanent terminal, for about $12 million, to the east of Canada Place.

They got nowhere.

They had to move into the new terminal built by Clarke and  Ledcor — essentially, a monopoly operation handed to a private developer by PavCo, the Crown agency that runs the new convention centre.

The story took a lot of messy twists and turns, with accusations and denials flying thick and fast. You can read some of them here and here and here.

Me, I have two questions of my own. I hope a journalist with enough clout to ask them, and enough budget to file their own FOIs, will get them answered:

1. This group of floatplane operators spent time and money trying to open their own terminal and run it, roughly speaking, as a co-op. It is widely rumoured that they approached the Vancouver  Airport Authority either for advice or to arrange a deal to have the authority run it for them. It is also widely rumoured that they got nowhere with their request.

Graham Clarke, who was chair of the airport authority at the time the operators would have come in to talk, later left the airport authority to build the new terminal himself.

There’s nothing up with that, right?

2. The floatplane operators also had to deal repeatedly, over time, with Port Metro Vancouver as they attempted to get approval to open their own terminal east of the convention centre, in an area controlled by the port. They got nowhere with that either, and in the end were left with one option: becoming tenants of a terminal built by Mr. Clarke.

Anne Bancroft-Jones is a member of the board of directors for the port, which turned the operators down when they tried to open their own site.

I understand that she is also Mr. Clarke’s wife.

There’s nothing up with that either, right?

Maybe someone somewhere could get us some answers to those questions — because when a Crown corporation hands a monopoly to a private developer, and a hugely powerful port authority turns down a group of businesses seeking to run their own facility on the public land that the authority administers, we deserve answers.

When the chatter and the rumours are so widespread on the waterfront — and through the industry — that they wash up on my doorstep, it would be really nice to know if there’s anything to them.

Oh, and that safety report we all paid for? It would be nice to have a copy of that too.

John Fairfax: an ocean-defying wild man with an obituary to die for

Damn.

It doesn’t matter what I do between now and the day I die: I will never have an obituary as lovely as this.

What can you say about a man who rowed across the Atlantic? And Pacific?

And those were only two of the achievements in Fairfax’s crazy, courageous, life-affirming 74 years.

These couple of paragraphs in his New York Times obit give you a taste of who the man was:

“At nine, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

“At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

“Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.”

Now go read the rest of the piece. And then go out and do something with your own day.

Mad as hell and not taking it any more: BC Ferries passengers shut ‘er down.

Sounds like frustrated ferries passengers finally hit the wall on Texada island today.

Comoxvalley.com is reporting that riders were angry over recent service and ship-shuffling that was kicked off when the Queen of Burnaby was pulled out of service for repairs just two months after an $11-million refit.

About two dozen residents of Texada — among the folks who have lost three daily round-trip sailings to Powell River — protested on board the Tachek this morning.

When the substitute ferry arrived at Texada, boarding was delayed for about 25 minutes by a “study session” — and unloading on the Powell River side was similarly delayed.

Company reps were apparently available and answered questions.

BC Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall told reporters that the company hoped passengers “would have a bit of patience with us. We are trying to provide the best possible service to all our customers.”

And she suggested the Queen of Burnaby may be back in service by Feb. 17.

So what to make of the fact tempers are reaching the breaking point?

Well, picture this happening to you:

Your regular ferry, the Queen of Burnaby, is sent off into drydock for repairs to a propeller hub that may or may not have been included in a refit that appears to have been rushed into completion for the Christmas holiday.

So Texada’s regular ferry, the North Island Princess, is sent off to Comox, although it isn’t nearly big enough to replace the Queen of Burnaby and has its own mechanical challenges.

The Tachek is sent to Texada.

And then today, the Tachek is re-assigned to help move traffic that’s backing up out of Comox.

So water taxis are assigned to Texada.

And our provincial ferry company is now flying passengers around on chartered planes to cope with the backlog.

And all of this is going on because the company no longer budgets, or can budget, for a genuinely spare vessel to keep around for emergency replacement duty.

And because its managers don’t seem to know how to plan and carry out regular maintenance, and refits, that are both timely and sufficient to keep this mess from happening.

Feel free to use the comment box below to explain how you might react.

Cheaping out on maintenance costs BC Ferries a bundle. And it raises safety questions.

Update: In the original of this post and in an earlier one on the Queen of of Burnaby, I mistakenly referred to a problem with the steering system. The problem is in fact with the propulsion system, of course. My apologies for the error and my thanks to those who pointed out my brain freeze.

I got several emails yesterday after I speculated that BC Ferries knew it still had problems with the Queen of Burnaby when it pulled the ferry out of an $11-million refit last December.

The simple answer to all of the people who wrote: yes, there are questions here that journalists should be asking.

If it’s true that the company was aware of possible problems  – and there is much chatter out there on the waterfront to just that effect — then it was a very expensive decision.

If it’s true, it was a troubling decision in other ways too.

There’s the money, first off. When you see news stories reporting that the ferry is “going into drydock” for repairs, you don’t often find reporters asking about the cost.

That’s too bad.

In this case, the ferry had been in drydock for some time late last year for the refit. If failing to complete the work properly (and rushing her back into service for the busy Christmas season?) forced a return to drydock this month, here’s just a rough initial calculation of the costs of pulling her back out. (The figures are all mine; anyone with a better, documentable set should feel free to weigh in.)

• Drydock booking fee: $4400
• Drainage fee: $8200
• Per day fee while on the chocks: $8800
• Per day fee for security: $450
• Per day docking charge: 12 cents per ton
• Plus cranes at anywhere from $450 to $950 per hour
• Plus sewer, power, water and air

And that’s just to get you ready for the work that needs done, which you also pay for.

Not a fortune, but a ridiculous waste of a whole lot of money. Especially at a time when the company has already to started to cut back heavily on routine maintenance.

Because the company has run out of ships, with the Queen of Burnaby out of service, Ferries has no choice but to fly passengers around on chartered air flights. That’s more money. So  journalists might want to ask for a running tally, or what the company expects it to cost — or for a date when we can get the final tally.

But the concern is more than just money.

As I’ve said, we just paid for two shiny new reports on safety and management practices at BC Ferries. One was commissioned by BC Ferries, which we own; the other was done by the provincial ferry commissioner, whose work is funded by the public through BC Ferries.

Together, they concluded that our company was safely and efficiently run.

I think that’s odd, given what’s going on with the Queen of Burnaby.

The repair work is still being done, and there’s no official word yet on what forced the ferry back into drydock.

The company says it needs to repair one of the propeller hubs. Most of us drive cars; we’ve heard about wheel hubs and we know all too well how parts can break suddenly, and at the most inconvenient times. So the announcement makes a kind of sense.

The problem is, the prop hub is a very complicated bit of machinery. And it was worked on as part of the refit. Or at least one of them was.

Let me put it this way: would you feel differently about this week’s ferry “problems” if you read a news story that said the Queen of Burnaby was being pulled from service, causing huge headaches for passenger and commercial traffic, to return for very expensive repairs to a part of the propulsion system that should have been addressed during an $11-million refit just two months earlier?

Right then.

How about if the story went on to question whether the problem was caused because maintenance was only performed on one prop during the refit? Sort of like you took your car in for an expensive tune up and they only rotated one tire?

That’s the kind of chatter that’s rippling around the waterfront this week as the Queen of Burnaby sits in drydock and our provincial ferry company flies passengers around on chartered planes.

And if there’s anything to the speculation, then how the heck can maintenance have fallen so completely apart just a month before the company’s safety practices got such a glowing review? How can a company be well managed, how can it be run efficiently when this kind of stuff happens?

And which officials from which outside agencies signed the ferry back into service, knowing if this was true?

This week, we’re watching exactly what happens when you don’t resolve those questions.

We’re watching BC Ferries Airlines in action.

So did the ferry leave an $11-million refit with propulsion problems remaining — or not?

Update: In the original of this post and in a later one on the Queen of of Burnaby, I mistakenly referred to a problem with the steering system. The problem is in fact with the propulsion system, of course. My apologies for the error and my thanks to those who pointed out my brain freeze.

Here’s a question for some enterprising journalist: did BC Ferries pull the Queen of Burnaby out of an $11-million refit knowing that problems remained with part of its propulsion system?

Might be nice to track down the answer, because that ferry just got pulled from service for prop repairs less than two months out of refit, and is now at Esquimalt in drydock for some undoubtedly pricey work, including pulling her out of the water again.

Because the company doesn’t keep any genuinely spare vessels around, the breakdown and the repairs also prompted a frantic shuffle to move ferries around to cover for the missing vessel — a shuffle that included moving the tiny North Island Princess, which was suffering her own brief mechanical challenges.

And then there’s the cost of extra customer service – which so far amounts to “shuttle service, hotel accommodation, meals, flights and alternative transportation” and includes charter flights, especially for medical appointments — while the regular ferry is out of commission. (At this point, I’d settle for someone asking what the extra services alone will cost…)

As well, I’m thinking that if the propulsion problem was clear before the ferry left refit, it might also be nice to track down an answer to this question: How can a company do things like that at a time when we have just paid for two reports that insist the company’s safety practices and management expertise are just fine?

The Queen of Burnaby was pulled out of service last week with what a problem the company now describes as a “hub” problem.

Good of them to let us know, for sure. But just to be clear, that’s not like the wheel hub on your Ford Focus. Not the same thing. Nowhere even close.

The hub is a critical end of the drive line that makes the propeller do its thing, including setting the blades at the command angle. It’s not simply some nut holding the screw in place.

It’s a complex piece of gear, as the clever folks over at TidalStation have pointed out.

No hub, no propulsion from that prop.

And if the ferry left refit with a question about the hub, maybe because of enormous pressure to get the ferry back in service for the busy Christmas season, then that would be, well, a lack of due diligence.

And it would underscore the fact that no matter how many people you hire and no matter how much you pay them, you won’t get a clear answer on how safely and efficiently this company is being run until you hire someone who can pry the full range of real, relevant data out of the company, understand what it means — and then feel free to say.

So maybe some journalist with access to company officials and a budget for FOI requests could get on those questions.

Because we’re not too far away from the day when the provincial government is going to have to make some decisions on the ferry service, and how it’s run, and who should be running it, and it would be nice for the public to have some accurate information with which to measure those decisions.

Getting a chance to handle a tug is way too cool. Even if it’s just for TV.

I don’t care how hokey this is, or how promotional it is, or how many questions it leaves unanswered.

Getting a chance to pretend to run a tug in our own port is just plain cool. Just. Plain. Cool.

Grim shipyard accident. Grim reminder.

There’s sad news this week out of Seattle, where a 39-year-old shipwright — a husband and a father of six — was killed while working on an oil rig at Vigor Shipyard.

William “Bull” Shelby, a marine carpenter, fell about 100 feet, hitting scaffolding on the way down. He died at the scene.

It’s always sobering when news breaks about a worker who leaves home one morning and never comes back, killed while simply doing his job.

It was certainly sobering for Mr. Shelby’s coworkers.

I was moved by news of a comment from Steve Hirsh, a spokesman for the shipyard, who said the yard was immediately stood down and remained that way during the investigation — because no one knew what had gone so wrong, and because workers were distracted.

“People are really affected by it,” Hirsh told the Kitsap Sun.

“(Mr. Shelby) was a good guy. He was a friend. It looks like these are tough men and women who have a hard job in this industry, and they do, but they’re people, and when one of their coworkers suffers this fate, it hits everybody hard.”

“We want to be sure people’s heads are in the game and not thinking about their friend,” he added. “At that time, that’s exactly what they should be focusing on, so we stopped work.”

The circumstances aren’t clear yet on Mr. Shelby’s death; news reports say there were no witnesses.

What is clear for those of us in Vancouver, who so recently celebrated the award of a big federal shipbuilding contract to the Washington yard here, is that the death of this Bremerton man should serve as a reminder.

There is indeed much joy in the winning of the contract. There is much to be celebrated in the revival of coastal yards over the next decade, and in the prospect of good jobs for people who live here.

But many of those jobs will come with risk for the workers who do them.

We all need to remember, and insist, that their workplaces are safe.

They all need to be able to get up in the morning and come home at the end of their shifts. Every one of them.

Meantime, our sympathies to Mr. Shelby’s family.

A “new phase in the evolution of BC Ferries”? Sad but true.

Wow, what a crazy bunch of ferry news to come home to after a couple of weeks away…

For now, let’s deal with today’s news: the breakdown of the Queen of Burnaby, and cancellation of at least a day’s worth of sailings Monday on the Comox-Powell River route.

It’s a nasty business for citizens and commercial interests to lose that big a bite of their transportation service. And it’s nasty for a company to have to shut down service when it’s trying to keep its lips above water and collect as much revenue as possible. And avoid big repair bills.

Here’s what occurs to me, off the top.

BC Ferries had to cancel all those sailings because there was no spare relief vessel in the fleet. And why is there no spare? Because the company decided to put its spares up for sale. Over warnings from staff. Because they were deemed too expensive to keep. Because the company is so chronically short of money.

There used to be a handful of ships the company could call out at moments like this — the Queen of Tsawwassen, for example, on the route that was affected today. She used to be tied up at Saltery Bay on the Sunshine Coast, I believe, and be pulled into service when needed, with a crew appropriately familiarized and ready to sail her.

She was one of the four Queens put up for sale in 2008 in a move that former CEO David Hahn described in remarkably accurate terms. “The sale of these four vessels marks a new phase in the evolution of BC Ferries,” he said.

Indeed.

Spare V-class ships were sold off with much gloating about the handful dollars they fetched. But that left no truly spare ships to call out in an emergency. So today there was a frantic shuffling of vessels — in this case, the much tinier North Island Queen was called into service to replace the Burnaby (although she has a capacity of 49 vehicles,  compared to 192 vehicles for the Queen of Burnaby, and no elevator, and washrooms only in the upper passenger area. And some of her own ongoing mechanical challenges). Some travellers will get left behind. Most commercial traffic won’t be accommodated while all this is going on.

It’s getting late tonight. So how about we keep this short and sweet…

We had two official reports in the last month assessing operations at BC Ferries. One said safety practices were basically ok. The other said the company was being managed well.

Huh.

So the Queen of Burnaby is laid up with some sort of problem related to her propulsion system — that is, she has a steering problem. I’m sure we’ll get a full report from the company as soon as they know what it’s all about, or as soon as curious reporters decide to ask.

Maybe it’s got to do with the oil distribution box on her port prop. Which maybe means there isn’t reliable pitch control on that prop. (Pitch control, that sounds familiar.) And maybe means the ferry will be heading over to the Esquimalt dry dock for repairs. And yes, that’s after an $11-million refit in 2011.

And the company that is being managed so competently decided it didn’t need to have a spare ship ready to drop into service for times like this, when it experiences mechanical problems of a kind that it’s way too familiar with already…

Huh.

I guess it would be cynical to wonder if that’s what you get when you shovel your ferry company debt and expenses off the government books to clear room for other debt, set up a new ferry company with a commercial mandate that it can’t possibly meet and then lard it with chief executives distinctly short on maritime experience.

The kind of experience that might have lead you to understand it would have been wise to have a spare ferry to tap on a day like today. And the kind of experience that also tells you that you have to know how to run the company efficiently enough to ensure you have the money to make it possible to keep that spare ferry around.

Huh.

More details on BC Ferries’ request to axe those 400 sailings

Earlier this week I posted an item about a story in Business in Vancouver, which was reporting that the government had quietly turned down a request by BC Ferries to drop about 400 sailings because of what it called uncertain demand.

BIV’s story said the government had made the decision, and that BC Ferries had confirmed that the request was put on hold pending release of a review of the Coastal Ferry Act by the provincial ferries commissioner. That review is expected to be released by the end of the month.

My apologies for some confusion in my post. Before I wrote it, I did a quick search of both the freedom-of-information sites run by the provincial government and by BC Ferries and couldn’t find a copy of the company’s proposal to drop the routes, a proposal that BIV’s story referred to.

It looks like my search of the provincial site must have been flawed. The proposal is actually there. And our thanks should go to BIV for making it public.

The proposal makes for a pretty interesting read.

It says that with traffic down four per cent on major routes over a year earlier, the company was seeking a four per cent decrease in the sailings it is required to provide on those routes,  for 18 months. If ridership worsened, the company would pursue further reductions; if it improved, they “would ensure sailings continue to match the capacity to carry traffic.”

It looks like the plan pretty much matched what then-CEO David Hahn said he was seeking when he announced the application last summer: 400 sailing cuts, mostly on extra sailings and only on the major routes.

Hahn did say it would only affect the off season, though, and the proposal clearly shows calculations through June of 2012 on Route 1, from Swartz Bay to Tsawwassen.

The proposal lays out exact proposed changes to the routes, and what saving were expected.

It’ll be interesting information to keep in mind as the ferry commissioner’s report is released and the debate over how well the new ferry act and the decision to push the company off the provincial books, and provide it with an operating subsidy and fixed sailing demands, has worked.

 

Audit gives thumbs up to safety at BC Ferries

The update of the review of BC Ferries’ safety practices has been released. It’s a fresh look by former auditor general George Morfitt, who did a similar audit in 2007.

I’m out the door now, so you have a look for yourselves. I’ll be updating later with some thoughts.

Find it here.