The Chilliwack
Progress Tuesday
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‘Friendly police officer on foot’ to patrol downtown
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Robert Freeman The Progress After years of cajoling and complaining, an RCMP officer has been dedicated to the downtown area of Chilliwack and will start regular foot patrols on Monday. Const. Ryan Price, a three-year-veteran of policing in Chilliwack, will walk the downtown beat, taking in Salish Park, Salish Plaza and the public library, all identified as crime “hot spots” in the Upper Fraser Valley RCMP detachment’s crime reduction strategy. “We’re going to see if this is a productive way of dealing with those crime hot spots,” said Cpl. Len VanNieuwenhuizen, head of the RCMP community policing office. He said the daytime foot patrols should also answer downtown merchants’ call for a more visible police presence and comfort customers while dis-comforting the bad guys. But it’s a pilot program at this point, he said. “We want to be flexible and move on to something better, if it doesn’t work,” he said. Kathy Funk, executive director of the Downtown Business Improvement Association, said the presence of “a friendly police officer on foot” in the downtown is seen as a “positive thing,” like “an ambassador.”
Visitors check out the Art Market during the 33rd annual Harrison Festival of the Arts at Harrison Hot Springs on Sunday afternoon. The festival continues throughout the week until July 17 with entertainment every weekday evening, full-day activities this weekend, and their Children’s Day tomorrow (Wednesday). For more info, go to harrisonfestival.com. For video from the first weekend of this year’s festival, go to theprogress.com. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Cessna crash ‘operational in nature,’ says investigator Robert Freeman The Progress The Cessna carrying two young men on a training flight in mountainous terrain crashed on its way home in a remote area west of the north end of Harrison Lake Tuesday. “They were planning a roundrobin trip and this was pretty much their last leg of it,” Bill Yearwood, an investigator with the Transportation Safety Board, told The Progress on Thursday following a helicopter trip to the crash site.
“The impact was not survivable,” he said. “It’s a tragic event and two young men lost their lives.” Pilot Brett Loftus, 25, from Langley, died in the crash along with student Joel Nortman, 23, from Vancouver. They had left Boundary Bay airport earlier that day for a lesson in flying in mountainous terrain. Which despite its beauty, Yearwood said is full of optical illusions and wind currents that challenge the navigation skills of experienced pilots. Yearwood could not determine the cause of the crash from the
on-site inspection of the wreckage, but he believes it was “operational in nature,” meaning it had to do with the performance of the aircraft in mountainous terrain. There is no voice or data recorder on small planes like the Cessna, he said, “so our information has to be gathered from very basic investigator techniques.” But it’s going to takes days, maybe weeks to get the wreckage down from the crash site at 2,950 feet above sea level, on a hillside about 200 feet below the crest of a ridge in the valley between two mountains.
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helicopter,” Unruh said. RCMP Cpl. Tammy Hollingsworth said the crash was “absolutely a tragic accident.” “The families and friends of these two men are understandably having difficulty dealing with their losses and are asking for their privacy,” she said. Because there is nothing to indicate anything criminal in the crash, the TSB and the B.C. Coroner’s Office now have full conduct of the investigation, she said.
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At this stage, Yearwood can’t even establish who was flying the Cessna at the time of the crash. He said Loftus was an experienced pilot, and fully licensed. The impact of the crash set off an emergency locator in the plane, which led officials to the crash scene late Tuesday. Greg Unruh, who led a Chilliwack search and rescue team, said a helicopter flew the SAR team and TSB officials to a landing area above the wreckage, and then they made their way down to the crash site. “Everything had to be done by
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