Dear Editor,
What is it about Fort Langley? There always seems to be a furore going on there. Now it’s about saving power poles for their historic value [Overhead wiring reminder of Fort history, March 17 Letters, Langley Advance].
Were there utility poles at the original forts?
If some residents feel the poles have a historic place, let them build a monument of some sort, perhaps a symbolic notice board.
Conjure up in your mind’s eye a typical pole. It’s ugly, often impedes and mars views, and can be a sight-line hazard.
Add to this a plethora of nasty-looking linesman’s spur scars, masses of rusted staples and nails and tattered remnants of old signs advertising garage sales and wanted posters for lost pets, and it all makes the urban utility pole one of the blights of the townscape.
Fort Langley will be beautified by pole removal, and will become worthy of the efforts designers and architects have been trying so hard to achieve.
If you travel around Britain you will often see narrow trench scars running down the middle of the road. They are where telephone and power lines have been buried.
It’s time this happened here, eliminating power outage problems and eventually getting rid of the masses of trees violated by the need for power-line trimming.
In the ’80s, the Social Credit government used down-town gusseting up as one of its planks in its re-election strategies, very similar to Whacky’s [Premier W.A.C. Bennett’s] road-paving ploys of the ’60s.
Unfortunately, local governments chose not to bury power lines at that time, even though with roads and sidewalks dug up it would have cost a pittance.
North American city centres are now paved with ubiquitous concrete, brick pavers in a plethora of similarity.
As we gradually improve urban landscapes, this work has now to be completed at a far greater cost.
John Howard, Aldergrove
