Reading club celebRates
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caps moving out of buRnaby
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towns tackle modeRn pRoblems
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burnaby-based better meals serves up good food to as many as 5,000 seniors all across b.c. See page a14
wednesday
September 12 2012 www.burnabynewsleader.com
Station Square movie theatre closes Wanda Chow
wchow@burnabynewsleader.com
boaz JoSeph/blaCk preSS
most hospital linens in the region are washed at k-bro in burnaby. prepping some items to be re-washed here are teresa curammeng (left) and mabel Hung.
Where every day is laundry day How hospitals get their whites so white (and blues so blue) boaz Joseph black press
Anyone who operates a washing machine literally the size of a railway car is pretty serious about laundry. And having two such machines, just metres apart and operating 15 hours a day, seven days a week, makes for quite the laundry room. Ron Graham can barely be heard above the rumbling of activity as
he gives a visitor a tour of K-Bro Linen Systems Inc. At 65,000 square feet, bigger than a football field, this is the larger of two company laundry warehouses in Burnaby that provide linens, linen delivery and linen-cleaning services to 18 hospitals and care facilities in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley. K-Bro serves most major hospitals, with just a few exceptions: Langley Memorial, Peace Arch, St. Paul’s and Riverview. While busy hospital staff may think nothing of the stuff they toss
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into the laundry hamper in the corner of the room or down the hall, there’s a massive engineering project behind the scenes that supports a critical area of medical care. The operation has nothing in common with a household laundry room—not when there are four tractor-trailer units parked outside the loading bays. Among the incoming piles to be processed: Assorted bedsheets, pillow cases, incontinence underpads, IV gowns, pajamas, towels, robes, washcloths, uniforms,
fresh fish daily
lab coats, overalls, stretcher sheets, surgical drapes—virtually anything that’s made of cloth that a hospital will re-use. Each day, Surrey Memorial Hospital alone produces about 4,500 kilograms of linens that have to be washed by K-Bro. The materials that come in are weighed, hand-sorted and separated into categories on conveyer belts and stuffed into hampers that resemble blue elephant cocoons dangling from a computer-controlled monorail system on the ceiling.
Regent
FISH MARKET
4020 Hastings Street, Burnaby • 604-298-9828
please see the SyStem, a4
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Station Square Cinemas closed on Labour Day, Sept. 3, marking the end of an era for local moviegoers. The sevenscreened theatre opened in December 1988, back when neighbouring Save-On-Foods was arguably the latest and greatest in local supermarkets and DVDs had yet to emerge, not to mention the Internet. “Really, it’s just a matter of a lease that had expired and the theatre itself didn’t really meet any longer our standards,” said Mike Langdon, director of communications for the theatre operator, Cineplex Entertainment. “We have a nearby theatre at Metropolis that will serve the community, so it just didn’t meet our standards and with the lease expiring it was the ideal opportunity to move on.” Station Square was a “smaller theatre that didn’t really meet the standards that we’re see Dolphin, a3