The Editor,
Pacific Coast Terminals (PCT) has been an integral part of the city of Port Moody since 1929. The residents around the terminal accepted its presence and the yellow piles of sulphur, and achieved a reasonable balance between industry and quality of life.
In the past few years, though, PCT has continue to expand its operations and, inevitably, its impact on Port Moody residents and their quality of life, destroying the balance that had existed before. I am not against industry and realize PCT was here before most of the houses but it is the impact of this continued expansion on the residents that is causing the problem.
I live and work, running my own company, from home, directly across from the terminal and over the past four years have had to endure extensive noise and light pollution, including two years of piledriving during the summer months (12 hours a day).
More recently, PCT has been building a berm beneath the water by dumping rocks into the inlet from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day in preparation for another extended period of dredging where it intends to dump the dredged mud on the Rocky Point side of the berm.
These machines make an intense grinding sound every time they pick up load of rocks to dump in the water. Try listening to that for 12 hours a day.
I have to close my doors and windows and put on noise-cancelling headset just to get my work done. On top of all that, PCT’s enormous potash building has a shiny roof that reflects the sunlight directly into my home and office windows (see photo above).
I have tried multiple times to contact PCT and the city of Port Moody, including Mayor Mike Clay about these issues.
Surely I should have some rights but the city repeatedly shrugs and does nothing, or fails to respond, and PCT has sent a few PR emails to try to pacify me — meanwhile, simply growing and growing and destroying our quality of life in Pleasantside (which some of us now call “not-so-Pleasantside”).
I have essentially given up trying to make any change and have resigned myself to having to leave this area to get away from this growing Industrial monstrosity that is consuming our inlet and destroying our standard of living. Are other Port Moody residents feeling the same way?
Russell Cullingworth,
Port Moody
