KAMLOOPS THIS WEEK TUESDAY
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JANUARY 20, 2015 | Volume 28 No. 9
WEATHER Cloudy High 1 C Low -1 C
SUN PEAKS SNOW REPORT Mid-mountain: 127 cm Alpine: 155 cm Snow phone: 250-578-7232
RCMP UNION IN FUTURE?
CURLING G FOR B.C.. CROWN N
Court ruling paves way for possibility
Team Russett seeks Scotties title
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HOLE LOT OF FISHING FUN Two-year-old Mathew Martens waits for a nibble on Walloper Lake on the weekend. The Kamloops Fish and Game Club’s annual Learn To Ice Fish Day attracted hundreds to the lake south of Kamloops on Sunday, Jan. 18, with perfect conditions greeting visitors. To see more photos, go online to kamloopsthisweek. com and click on the Community tab. ALLEN DOUGLAS/KTW
Season of traffic snarls has arrived downtown And now the traffic delays begin. As work continues on the $80-million, seven-storey clinical-services building fronting Columbia Street at Royal Inland Hospital, there will be intermittent, temporary road closures and traffic rerouting on RIH’s campus ring road to accommodate construction activity. The day-long closures will begin on Monday, Jan. 19, and will occur periodically until the fall. The impact will be primarily to the road along the front of the hospital campus, next to the CSB construction site. Motorists are advised to use extreme caution, slow down for pedestrians, obey traffic signs and yield to flag people. There may also be traffic delays to accommodate construction vehicles requiring access to the job site via the hospital’s ring road. Regular access to the hospital’s parkade entrance will be unaffected. Vehicles leaving the parkade will be required to use a different traffic pattern. Drivers might have to reloop back around to access the Third Avenue entrance or head back on the road running alongside Peterson Creek that exits at Fifth Avenue.
Construction workers fasten pre-made concrete forms onto the next level under construction at Royal Inland Hospital. Regular traffic delays will now begin as new clinical-services building rises at Columbia Street and Third Avenue. DAVE EAGLES/KTW
Plunging oil price leads to layoffs in city CAM FORTEMS STAFF REPORTER cam@kamloopsthisweek.com
Forty-eight Kamloops families are among the first in the city to feel the pain of plunging oil prices. While the collapse in oil prices has been a boon to drivers, Horizon North Logistics announced yesterday (Jan. 19) it will lay off 48 workers in Kamloops. Company-wide, Horizon will lay off 130 employees. Horizon North, which builds housing and related infrastructure for mining and oil and gas industries, employes 1,800 people, with more than 300 of them in Kamloops. CEO Rod Graham said as the price of oil began to slide last year, the company stopped overtime, encouraged shift-sharing and transferred workers in order to avoid layoffs. But, he added, with a glut of supply on world markets bringing the price of a barrel of oil to below $50, the company had to act. The 48 workers affected in Kamloops are in the manufacturing operation of Horizon. Despite the layoffs, the company will continue construction of its 25,000-square foot office complex on the Tk’emlups Indian Band reserve. “It’s a heart-wrenching day,” Graham said. “The precipitous drop in the price of oil has made a number of our customers decide to delay or defer project work. I don’t think it’s lost.” Graham said the company’s Kamloops location is its premier manufacturing facility and sees it as a long-term investment that can weather commodity cycles.
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