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Tuesday, November 6, 2018 | Your community newspaper since 1916

Queensway to be closed at Patricia Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca Queensway Street will be closed at Patricia Boulevard starting Wednesday to allow the city to install a new sewer line. The city hopes to have the stretch reopened by the beginning of December, said engineering director Adam Homes. “We’re going to be working six days a week and 12-hour days to get this opened as quickly as possible,” he said. He said the pipe will be placed seven metres underground. And because it’s in the city’s floodplain, now is the best time of year to do the work, when the groundwater is at its lowest, Homes said. The work is needed because the existing system, which serves the downtown and the industrial area to the east of Queensway, is at capacity. The upgrade is also part of the larger project to improve aging infrastructure in the vicinity of city hall that is at capacity, in poor condition, or at high risk of failure. The work will allow for more housing and commercial development downtown, the city said. The new system is about one kilometre long and will extend from the intersection at Seventh Avenue and Dominion Street, past city hall, to Patricia Boulevard, across Queensway, and along the base of the Patricia Boulevard escarpment to a lift station at Fourth Avenue and London Street. From there, the new sewer line will join the existing system that connects to the wastewater treatment plant on Lansdowne Road more than five kilometres away. Alternate routes to the downtown from the south are available along Victoria and Winnipeg Streets.

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The installation of a new sanitary sewer line along Lower Patricia Boulevard will require Queensway to be closed at the intersection with Patricia for several weeks. “We’re extremely grateful for residents’ understanding during this project and we would also like to remind motorists to follow traffic signs and to drive cautiously in the area of road closures and detours,”

Homes said. It includes replacing 60-year-old watermain made of cast iron and rated as “very high risk” for failure. Crews also removed remnants of an old

wooden pipe used to distribute water many years ago. The intersections at Sixth and George and at Seventh and Dominion will reopen in about a month, according to city hall.

B.C. Corrections officers didn’t stop as inmate dies in back of van Kim BOLAN Vancouver Sun For more than an hour as they drove down Highway 97 in the back of a B.C. Corrections van on Oct. 4, inmates pounded on the walls and shouted for help. They were worried that fellow passenger Alex Joseph was dying of a drug overdose, after watching him slump to the floor, at first snoring heavily, but later turning blue. The jail guards driving the van from Prince George to Maple Ridge stopped for coffee in Williams Lake, but didn’t respond to their shouts, three of the inmates who were also in the van told Postmedia this week. When the van finally pulled over, north of 100 Mile House, Joseph, 36, was unresponsive. A passerby stopped and performed CPR, but he was dead. His brother, Joseph Antoine, said Friday that he has a lot of questions about how his brother ended up dead while in the care of B.C. Corrections. “For sure, it is upsetting,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. I would like to know why and how this happened.” Gordon Hansen, in custody on fraud charges, was in the same compartment as Joseph – each handcuffed and shackled – when the other inmate appeared to pass out after snorting something. “We go around a corner and he can’t brace himself, so he slides off the seat onto me and then falls onto the floor,” Hansen said in a phone interview from Fraser Regional Correctional Centre. “I took his leg up, slapping him, trying to get him up, but he’s snoring, so I know he is alive.” Joseph later stopped snoring and his hand was blue. Hansen checked his breathing. He thought the officers in the cab

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Alex Joseph died in the back of a jail van despite efforts by the other prisoners to alert the van’s driver and guard that the man was in distress. would see Joseph on cameras they monitor. But the van passed through Quesnel and continued on to Williams Lake without anyone checking on Joseph. Hansen thinks the van was about 50 kilometres south of Williams Lake when it finally stopped. “When they got me out, there was already an RCMP (officer) there, lights flashing,” he said. Hansen said paramedics did not arrive for a long time – he thinks 40 minutes to an

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hour. Joseph was dead, but still in shackles and handcuffs. Keghan Cosh was in the next compartment, but was able to see Joseph collapse onto the floor. “Just before Williams Lake, I could see that his hand was just blue. He was going under. He was done. He needed a naloxone shot and he would have been fine,” Cosh said in an interview from Fraser Regional. “We were banging (on the van walls) at this time, maybe 10 or 20 minutes

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before Williams Lake. Maybe for half an hour, we were like screaming at the top of our lungs: ‘This guy is in overdose. Pull over, man.’” Cosh thinks the officers just assumed they were misbehaving, “Which is understandable. I get it.” But he thinks they should have noticed on their cameras that Joseph was in distress. “For anyone to be treated the way that guy was treated is inhumane,” said Cosh, who has struggled with addiction himself and is serving a sentence for theft under $5,000. In a statement, B.C. Corrections official Cindy Rose said “any in-custody death is a tragedy and our thoughts are with the family and friends of this individual.” She also said her agency is conducting “a formal review of the circumstances to make recommendations that may reduce the likelihood of a similar incident in the future.” “Staff in the cab of vehicles can monitor inmates via cameras mounted in the passenger compartment, supplemented by a two-way communications system,” the statement said. The government did not respond to specific questions about what the inmates said happened before Joseph died. The inmates also said they were being moved because of staffing shortages at the Prince George jail. Rose said only that inmates are transported between provincial jails “on an as-needed basis.” Andy Watson, of the B.C. Coroners Service, said an investigation is underway to determine “the official cause of death and any contributory factors.” — see ‘AT THE TOP, page 3

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