Suspend the Departure Bay Forcemain Project Until Emergency Access Is Guaranteed

The Regional District of Nanaimo is moving ahead with the Departure Bay Pump Station and Forcemain Project, a $19 million plus replacement of an aging 50 year old sewer forcemain running roughly 4 kilometres from the Departure Bay Pump Station to the treatment centre on McGuffie Road. Renewed infrastructure is important, to be sure. The concern is not whether the work is done, but how it is being staged, and the impact to the health and safety of this community for the four years it is underway.

Beginning in 2027, the plan enforces one way southbound traffic on Hammond Bay Road. Everyone heading north, whether to get home, to get to work, to get anywhere, gets detoured onto Departure Bay Road, Uplands Road, and Rutherford Road. For four years. That isn't a weekend or a few months of inconvenience. That's a multi-year re-routing of one of North Nanaimo's main arteries, affecting an estimated 35,000 residents every single day.

The traffic consequences are obvious to anyone who drives this area: longer trips, idling congestion funneled onto residential streets that were never designed to carry it, and a single constrained corridor in and out of a large, densely populated part of the city.

But the consequence that should concern all of us most isn't congestion. It's what congestion does to emergency response, and what it asks of the people who answer our 911 calls.

Our firefighters, paramedics, and RCMP members already do extraordinary work under real pressure. BC's Auditor General found that ambulances meet their 9 minute urban response target only about half the time, not because of the crews, but because the demands on the system are enormous. The City of Nanaimo's own Fire Master Plan documents that Nanaimo Fire Rescue is already working hard to meet its travel time goals, with "distance to incidents" identified as one of the biggest challenges they face. These are dedicated people stretched thin, doing everything they can to reach us in an emergency, in time.

That's exactly why this matters. When you call 911, minutes decide outcomes. A house fire reaches "flashover," the point at which an entire room ignites at once and the space becomes unsurvivable, in as little as 5 minutes. After that, lives are lost and the home is almost certainly gone. Survival from sudden cardiac arrest drops by roughly 10 percent for every minute that help is delayed, and the same unforgiving math applies to stroke and serious trauma. Adding kilometres of detour across a whole quadrant of homes doesn't reflect on our responders at all, it simply asks the impossible of them. We shouldn't put the people who protect us in the position of racing a clock that local government made harder to beat.

We are not asking anyone to oppose replacing the forcemain, and we are not pointing a finger at the men and women who keep us safe. We are asking a fair question, on their behalf and ours: before the first shovel goes in the ground, we call on the Regional District of Nanaimo to suspend this project until residents are provided with all of the following:

Documented evidence of an emergency response plan. Verified, written confirmation, developed jointly with Nanaimo Fire Rescue, BC Emergency Health Services, and the RCMP, that fire, police, and ambulance services will be able to meet their current response times to every part of the affected area throughout all phases of construction.

Documented evidence of first responder access. Verified confirmation that the firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who live within the affected area will be able to reach their workplaces and report for duty without delay in the event of an emergency during construction.
A documented plan to shorten the project timeline. A credible, documented alternative construction plan that reduces the duration of this project from four years to a guaranteed maximum of 24 months, or a documented, independently reviewed explanation of why a shorter timeline is not achievable, thereby cutting the period of elevated risk to the community wherever it is possible to do so.
Until these conditions are satisfied and made public, we ask that the project not proceed.

If this matters to you, please sign and share this petition with everyone you know who lives or drives in Departure Bay and North Nanaimo.