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Delta's 50 years of being a port town

Bigger changes could be on the horizon for the city
delta port
A 1969 photograph of construction activity at the Roberts Bank coal terminal.

This month marks the 50th anniversary Delta became home to a port.

It changed the local landscape forever, but even bigger changes could be coming.

A much-talked coal port facility officially opened at Roberts Bank on June 15, 1970, no doubt one of the most significant events in the community’s history.

It was an exciting time as thousands attended the ceremony including special guests Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and B.C Social Credit Premier W.A.C Bennett.

The 55-acre bulk loading facility, referred to as the Roberts Bank superport, had an estimated cost of $9 million.

Operated by Westshore Terminals, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kaiser Resources, the port was one of the largest deep sea facilities in the world.

The first clanging, whistling trainload carrying a load of coal, in fact, arrived at Westshore Terminals two months earlier, carrying a shipment from Sparwood, B.C. destined for Japan.

Accepting the coal, the first ship to sail out of the port was named Snow White.

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A 1969 aerial view of construction of the Roberts Bank coal port looking north toward Westham Island. The causeway is partially completed.

Mayor Dugald Morrison was on hand for the grand opening, calling it a great day for Deltans.

“The additional industries and employment resulting could change the whole face of Delta. We have a very bright future,” Morrison said.

The Delta Optimist reported that despite water spraying, a large cloud of dust arose when coal was dumped from the first rail car, forcing spectators to stand aside.

Commenting on concerns about pollution, Morrison said “We will be watching it very closely.”

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Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Bennett at the grand opening of the new coal port in Delta in 1970.

The new coal port also brought its fair share of controversy as well.

The hotly debated issues in the years before the facility opened included taxation, where new rail lines should be located, as well as the expropriation of thousands of acres of farmland in Brunswick Point for future industrial development which never occurred.

The new port was just one of several significant additions to Delta in a momentous transformation in the once sparsely populated farming community, ever since the George Massey Tunnel opened to vehicular traffic just over a decade earlier.

Between 1969 and 1972 alone, Delta's population jumped from 32,635 to 52,693 residents, newcomers who would have a busy port as their neighbour.

Five decades later, Westshore Terminals, now controlled by the Jim Pattison Group, continues to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and remains the largest dry bulk terminal on the west coast of the Americas.

In 1980, the senior governments signed a $50 million pact to expand the coal port.

A year earlier, an expansion proposal had been quashed due to environmental concerns, but the revised proposal had been designed to minimize environmental impacts.

The facility ships steelmaking (metallurgical) and energy (thermal) coal to over 20 countries worldwide.

 

Westshore five years ago undertook a $275 million facility upgrade within the existing footprint.

According to Westshore, sustainability means ensuring the facility minimizes the impact of its operations and protects the natural environment for future generations.

“The tidal flats at Roberts Bank are one of our region’s most ecologically rich environments. Over our four decades of operations, the reef systems around Westshore have created robust ecosystems for birds, fish and other marine life. It is abundant with crab and an established salmon fry feeding ground, attracting migrating birds in the thousands, along with resident killer whales, which frequent this part of Georgia Strait,” Westshore states.

Before the coal port opened, there was already talk how Roberts Bank would also be an ideal container terminal base as well.

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Westshore is the largest coal export facility in North America.

 

In 1968, for instance, engineer and consultant Robert Chisholm, in a presentation to the South Delta Social Credit Association, noted senior port officials in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach were fully aware of the proposed superport at Roberts Bank and were pushing for development to meet the challenge.

Container business, however, wouldn't be added in Delta for years to come.

 

Fast forward to the early '90s and the port had long established itself as part of South Delta's identity, but much more was to come when, in 1992, the Vancouver Port Corporation released PORT 2010, a comprehensive long-term plan for the use of port-owned lands into the next century.

A new container terminal at Roberts Bank was a key element in that strategy, finally bringing talk about moving containers out of South Delta closer to reality.

That year, the port corporation unveiled its plans to build a $206 million container terminal, a project which would dramatically further alter the municipality.

“If Canada wants to remain competitive with the United States in terms of transportation, it has to do something very dramatic and soon in terms of container transportation,” Patrick Reid, port manager and CEO of the port corporation, told Delta council in April 1992.

He said Roberts Bank was the ideal location because it would be in an existing, vacant site already equipped with rail entry.

He also noted community and environmental impacts would be minimal, and that the area was surrounded by good truck and highway infrastructure.

The facility would be constructed on 87.5 acres adjacent to the Westshore terminal.

The majority of the containers would be shipped by train with the balance distributed by truck to regional destinations, said Reid.

Local farmers, though, weren't happy with plans to extend Deltaport Way to accommodate additional traffic.

“We've learned from the past that if the government wants to do something it'll go ahead and do it,” said then Delta Framers' Institute president Albert Weaver.

Also concerned was Anne Murray of the Boundary Bay Conservation Committee, who said she doubted the port would live up to its promises when it came to environmental compensation.

She also said she and many others assumed Delta was going to be kept as a farming/environmental community.

Ald. Bob Mountfort at the time, however, welcomed the project.

“It (terminal) will bring economic activity to Delta. We're trying to show people that Delta is a place to develop industrial business,” he said.

The new container facility would come at a time when Delta's population had skyrocketed to almost double since the early 1970s, so its impacts would be felt by more people than the original coal port.

Opened in 1997, Deltaport is now the busiest container terminal in Canada.

In January 2010, the Port of Vancouver and Global Container Terminals proudly opened an expansion at Deltaport called the Deltaport Third Berth.

Three years earlier, more than 200 people packed a public meeting at the Ladner Community Centre to hear various groups describe the community's imminent demise as a result of the expansion of Deltaport and loss of valuable farmland to container storage.

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T2 would include a new three-berth marine container terminal, a widened causeway to the mainland to accommodate additional road and rail infrastructure as well as an expanded tug basin to accommodate a second tug operations contractor.

Dubbed Save Our Delta, the meeting, organized by the APE (Against Port Expansion), speakers spoke to the converted when it came to the port, implications of the Tsawwassen First Nation treaty, B.C. Rail's plans and the new South Fraser Perimeter Road.

“Wherever you look, communities around ports become the sickest communities and the poorest communities” said Donna Passmore with the Fraser Valley Conservation Coalition.

Fast forward 13 years and it doesn’t look like wide-spread community activism in Delta has ever taken off, although APE and others continue to try to raise awareness and warnings about port and industrial expansion.

Six years ago, the port authority formally submitted an application for an even bigger project in Terminal 2 (T2), a massive new three-berth facility to be built on a man-made island adjacent to the current complex.

It would provide an additional 2.4 million TEUs of container capacity per year.

The port says that based on current container traffic and capacity forecasts, the entire capacity of the T2 project is needed to ensure Canada is able to meet trade plans and objectives through to the mid-to-late 2030s.

Having undertaken extensive road, rail and infrastructure expansion projects in South Delta over recent years, the port noted independent forecasts show that west coast container ports will be full by as early as the mid-2020s and therefore unable to accommodate growing trade, which “will have far reaching consequences to the Canadian economy.”

Port president and CEO Robin Silvester in an interview explained, “The picture is all across the board. We have the major terminals (Deltaport, Vanterm, Centerm and Fraser Surrey Docks) and they’re all seeing strong volumes. In fact, close to capacity, so it’s really just underlining the importance of continuing to deliver capacity to accommodate Canadian growth in containers.”

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The group Against Port Expansion says scientists with Environment and Climate Change Canada cite significant adverse environmental effects that can't be mitigated, but political interference blocked that latest report from reaching the review panel.

Assuring environmental impacts will be minimal and mitigated, the port also notes it conducted over 35,000 hours of fieldwork by over 100 professional scientists, and fieldwork is continuing.

The T2 application finally made it to an independent review panel public hearing in Delta last year.

APE and Citizens Against Port Expansion (CAPE) warned once again the environmental impacts will be devastating.

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GCT raises several questions including the cumulative impacts resulting in the construction and operation of T2, as well as the enforceability of the port's promised environmental mitigations.

Among their arguments against the project is a submission by Environment and Climate Change Canada to the review panel, a submission that disagreed with the port’s conclusion the project would result in no residual effects to coastal birds.

APE’s Roger Emsley said, “Are there locations elsewhere in B.C., other than Roberts Bank, that can provide all the container terminal capacity required to meet Canada’s trading needs, with much less environmental damage, without ever building T2? Answer: yes.”

Also raising questions about the port’s business case is Global Container Terminals, which is proposing instead a fourth berth built next to the existing facility and continues to lobby against T2.

GCT is also asking the federal government to provide a fair assessment opportunity for the fourth berth alternative.  

The City of Delta, meanwhile, has conveyed several concerns, including wanting an assurance “that any approval of RBT2 must be contingent upon the resolution of traffic congestion at the George Massey Tunnel.”

The potential industrialization of large tracts of prime farmland to serve the port has also been a major concern, one also raised by Mayor George Harvie.

The review panel has submitted its final report to the federal environment minister and later this year the port will find out if its mega project gets the green light.

Meanwhile, the Port of Vancouver has been looking into the feasibility of building a second Lower Mainland cruise ship terminal on the banks of the Fraser River, already having conducted a preliminary study looking at potential sites in Delta or Richmond.