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Wednesday, March 27, 2019 | Your community newspaper since 1916

Museum gets section of historic wooden pipe Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca The Exploration Place has always been Prince George’s pipeline to the past, but now the City of Prince George has passed them some historic pipeline. One of the reasons the new housing development beside city hall ran into months of delays was the old infrastructure that got uncovered during the dig. One of the most surprising discoveries was the presence of wooden water pipes, also known as staves, that once serviced the homes and businesses of George Street back at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of that piping was in remarkably good condition today. It was only an arm’s length of it, but city staff felt The Exploration Place should have a section of this piping as an artifact telling a little story of our municipal infrastructure history. The pipe is a circular column composed of wood sliced at angles and fitted together with tongue-in-groove joints. Imagine a long, straight wine barrel wrapped in thick wire. The joints were slightly loose to the touch. “The water would expand the wood and tighten the joints,” said Exploration Place curator Alyssa Tobin-Leier. The general properties and usage of these wooden utility pipes were already known at The Exploration Place. Someone had donated a smaller section that had been used to connect a house to the city’s larger wooden watermains. The homeowner’s piece was eight inches in diameter while the piece donated by the city was 10 inches. “Someone donated a sample to us when they found it on their property on Johnson Street,” Robin-Leier said. “It was about one and a half metres (approximately five feet) below the ground’s surface.” The two segments are now stored in the same artifact locker inside the museum’s repository. The two pieces seem to be constructed of fir and show little signs of rot. What decay exists could have developed post-use. It was not, therefore, a shortsighted idea to use wood as buried water vessels. Tobin-Leier even found a historical photo from this region showing outflow pipes several feet in diameter in what might be a dam construction project. “The stave we just got from the city probably dates back to the 1910s,” said TobinLeier. “That is when there was a water tower constructed on Connaught Hill to gravityfeed water to the town site down below, and these pipes would likely have been connected to that. They tore the water tower down in 1958, so that’s when the stave system would have gone into disuse. When

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The Exploration Place curator Alyssa Tobin-Leier looks through a section of the wooden water pipe that crews excavated from the area around city hall. The city has donated sections of the pipe to the museum to be preserved. the city crews were digging for the new housing complex, they found clay and metal pipes as well, all of them old, and there was no reliable map of the underground infrastructure back then, so they were coming across this system basically by accident as they worked.” In the Jan. 30, 1915 edition of the Prince George Post newspaper, it was written that a Col. Thompson assessed the sewage, water and lighting systems of the upstart town. Thompson’s report stipulated that there was 700 feet of 10-inch pipe on Quebec Street. A total of 3,812 feet of eight-inch pipe ran along Third Avenue between Brunswick and George Streets plus along George Street from First Avenue to the standpipe on Connaught Hill. A total of 1,980 feet of six-inch pipe ran along segments of Patricia Boulevard; Que-

bec, Brunswick and Ontario Streets; and Third, Fourth and Fifth Avenues. It was in aid of commercial and residential water supply, and also firefighting. The cost of the pipes, valves, crosses, plugs, nine hydrants and an engine, connections, tanks and other associated stuff amounted to $47,800. That amount was calculated on the estimated price of steel pipe, plus its shipping, plus installation at seven feet of depth, based on case studies in Calgary and Edmonton. There was a necessity to use a system of three-inch pipes to service residents but that, said the report, would offer “practically no fire protection” and should be “of a purely temporary nature.” The report indicated factors like proximity to railroad, runoff from nearby hills, proximity to sawmills, the presence of a

former river channel, and the array of existing wells as part of planning that should be considered for future expansion of the water utility system. “For a long time to come the standpipe on Connaught Hill will serve for Prince George, South Fort George and all intervening country,” said Thompson’s report, as published by The Post. “If a large population should settle in Fort George near or west of Central Avenue, in order to balance circulation, a second standpipe, holding water at the same elevation as the one on Connaught Hill will have to be erected, probably near the intersection of Winchester and Seventh Avenue.” As another option, the one favoured by Thompson, the municipality was also advised to secure freshwater sources near the river “at points close to the railroad.”

Transfers to be scrapped under revamped bus fare schedule Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca A revamped transit fare schedule that will do away with transfers while also encouraging users to purchase passes that give them an unlimited amount of rides for the day will come into force in September. The changes include increasing the fares students and seniors will pay for cash fares and 10-ticket books to the same levels adults pay, translating into increases of 50 cents and $4.50 respectively. But a DayPASS, which allows a rider to use the bus through an entire calendar day, will drop to $5, a decline of 25 cents for students and seniors and $1.25 for adults. And in the process, transfers will be eliminated. They provide a 90-minute window for a one-way trip that requires more than one bus but are often abused with riders using them to make round trips. Transfers are the “number one cause of conflict between operators and the public as well as a means for fare fraud through the use of expired transfers,” BC Transit manager of sales and revenue Ryan Dennis told city council during a presentation on Monday night.

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Transit bus stop at Pine Centre Mall. The city is changing fares for the transit system. Dennis said the same program is now in place in Victoria and Nanaimo and added ridership has increased in both communities as a result. He attributed the rise to two reasons – the convenience of the DayPASS, which can be purchased onboard a bus, and “greater use of monthly passes as those become more affordable relative to frequent purchases of the DayPASS.”

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The cost of monthly passes will rise. Adults will pay $60, up $2.50 and students and seniors will be charged $50, a $2 increase. Also, student semester passes will rise by $10 to $135. BC Transit had been pushing for a $160 student semester pass, but city council’s finance and audit committee turned down the proposal. A ProPASS, purchased by employees through payroll deduc-

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tions, will cost $51.50 per month, up $2.15. And registered handyDART users will pay $2.50 per cash fare ride, up 25 cents. That did not sit well with Coun. Murry Krause, who noted many seniors and people with disabilities are on fixed incomes and rely on transit to get to medical appointments. In response, BC Transit government relations manager

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Rob Ringma said he is close to completing a report that he will forward to city staff on improvements to the HandyDART service that will help justify the increase. BC Transit is also in the process of outfitting buses with technology that will allow customers to use their phones and computers to determine if a bus is on time or behind schedule. The technology should be in place by this fall, council was told. “If you see that your bus is five minutes late, that’s five minutes extra that you can spend indoors, warm,” Ringma said. Also, weekend adult passengers using a prepaid fare type such as a DayPASS, will be able to bring along up to four children, up from the current two. As it stands, 29 per cent of the system’s cost is recovered through the users, two percentage points below the average for tier one systems provincewide “and is projected to continue to decrease towards 30 per cent if we maintain the current fare structure,” city transit planner Champa Maduranayagam told council. Based on the experiences in Victoria and Nanaimo, revenue from the changes is expected to rise by six per cent, or $107,763 and ridership is projected to go up three per cent or 49,298 rides.

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