As the sun sets over the horizon on another decade, the Richmond News looked back on the most memorable stories in each of the last 10 years:
2010:
An easy one. The 2010 Winter Olympics, partly hosted in Richmond at the Olympic Oval, where the world’s best long track speed skaters graced the ice.
Who could forget the Olympic Torch relay through the streets of Richmond, Heineken House, the O Zone and the images of the city’s own Rick Hansen making his way along Minoru Track holding aloft the Olympic flame.
For a brief few weeks, Richmond was party central in the Lower Mainland and it will live long in the memory.
The Richmond News even got in on the act with its award-winning Olympic Daily Report publication.
2011:
Few Richmondites can forget the day in October when a small plane crashed and burst into flames during the afternoon rush-hour on Russ Baker Way, just a few yards short of YVR’s south terminal.
Dramatic pictures showed heroic motorists running towards the fireball to help the stricken crew and passengers.
The pilot, Luc Fortin, 44, and first officer Matt Robic, 26 – who earlier reported an oil leak before returning to YVR on the twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 100 – survived the crash, but later died in hospital from their burn injuries.
Their passengers suffered serious, but non-life-threatening injuries.
Their plane had taken off from YVR bound for Kelowna, where the passengers planned to attend a business conference, but turned around about 15 minutes into the afternoon flight somewhere over Golden Ears Provincial Park after the pilots reported a problem.
A subsequent Transportation Safety Board report noted the aircraft was about 300 metres above ground and less than half a kilometre from the runway when it “suddenly banked left and pitched nose-down."
2012:
Richmond MP Alice Wong caused a bit of “a stir” when she decided – in front of an Asian-only media scrum in a Chinese restaurant – to tuck into a bowl of the controversial shark fin soup.
The Conservative politician move was in response to a growing call for the City of Richmond to follow the lead of neighbouring municipalities in banning shark fin products, with Canada being the largest importer of shark fins outside of Asia.
At the time, Wong said eating shark fin was part of the Asian culture and that freedom of choice should prevail when it comes to serving the likes of the soup delicacy, found mostly in Asian restaurants.
However, this year (2019), Wong did a “180,” saying she was fully behind a new ban on importing and exporting shark fin products.
The Conservative MP for Richmond Centre was in favour of the ban, which became law as part of Bill C-68, which amended the Fisheries Act.
“While something is legal, we should be allowed to consume it. It’s about freedom of choice, as long as it’s legal,” she said, explaining her previous opposition.
Shark-finning involves sharks being caught, having their fins sliced off, with the still-live body tossed back into the ocean.
The practice has led to many varieties of the species being harvested close to extinction.
2013:
The retail industry in Richmond hogged the headlines in 2013, with the previously controversial arrival of Walmart on Alderbridge Way finally getting city council approval in November.
The naysayers claimed the landscape and vista from the adjacent Garden City Lands would be forever altered and neighbouring small businesses would close as a result of the corporate giant coming to town.
The same month, shoppers lined up to be among the first through the doors of the new Target store in Lansdowne Centre.
The opening of the popular American retailer was greeted with joy among consumers, until they quickly realized most of the Target stores in Canada lacked the variety and value of the ones in the U.S.
It was no surprise when Target liquidated its Canadian stores in February of 2015.
2014:
2014 was the year of the strike, with the long-running Ikea dispute gathering moss and the teachers enacting job action in the spring.
The teachers started with low-level job action in April, before ramping it up to a full-on strike in June, before continuing the picket lines in September.
In the fall, the 17-month long Ikea dispute finally came to an end.
2015:
Some may recall the drought of 2015, with stage 3 water restrictions put in place across Metro Vancouver.
The restrictions went into effect in mid-July and ended in early September, resulting in the City of Richmond issuing 407 violation tickets, totalling $208,200 in fines, after it received numerous complaints of lawn watering. The city ended up spending an additional $500,000 watering juvenile trees by hand with reclaimed water.
However, it was the revival of Richmond’s great language divide that continued to garner national headlines in 2015, a year in which Richmond city council chose to take on an educational approach with businesses, instead of imposing a mandatory bylaw to address Chinese-only signage.
While Chinese-only signs only account for about four per cent of officially regulated signs, the city proposed to address all secondary signs, in an attempt to “de-clutter” business fronts.
The city received legal advice that a mandatory bylaw, dictating signs must be at least 50 per cent English or French, would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unless it could be shown that the issue is affecting community harmony.
The language issue ended the year with a flurry when a condo owner made a human rights complaint because his strata council held meetings in Mandarin. The story prompted a record number of comments on the Richmond News’ website and social media.
2016:
There’s a town in Scotland, called Kirkcaldy, which a famous comedian suggested should change its name to “What’s that (expletive) smell?” because that’s all people would say as they got off the train. The smell was the odour emanating from the local linoleum factory.
In 2016, the same logic could have been applied to Richmond, after residents started to make a stink about the smell coming from Harvest Power’s composting facility in rural east Richmond.
The smell was sometimes so bad, it made people sick as far away as Steveston Village and prompted a Facebook called “Stop the Stink” to kick up.
The U.S.-based Harvest Power tried to work with the residents and Metro Vancouver to mitigate the odours wafting across the city.
However, they finally gave up the fight late in 2018, with creditor protection proceedings put in place and a report in April of this year pegging the clean-up cost of close to 400,000 cubic meters of organic waste and the deconstruction of a waste-to-energy system at between $15.3 million to $35.8 million.
2017:
The Richmond News’ feature which dug deep into the emerging industry of “birth tourism” in Richmond was, and still is, one of the longest running stories to hit the headlines.
But it’s likely the incredible video captured in May at Steveston Harbour which people will remember the most.
It was, of course, footage of a sea lion dragging a young girl into the harbour, as she posed at the dock for a family photo.
A man, thought to be a family member, jumped in and pulled the girl to safety. Shaken, the girl was reunited with family members and walked away.
The video went viral around the globe, amassing millions of views online.
2018:
Much of the year was marred by protests from some Richmond residents, firstly over a proposal to site a temporary modular housing project in the city centre and, secondly, over the school board implementing its controversial SOGI policy.
However, the huge bog fire that sent plumes of thick smoke billowing above and over Richmond in July, during one of the hottest summers ever recorded in B.C., can’t be easily forgotten.
Early morning reports of smoke coming out of the peat woodland at the DND Lands, near Westminster Highway and Shell Road, quickly developed into a wildfire.
It became one of the biggest fires ever in Richmond, ravaging 12.3 hectares of the 55-hectare forested parcel confined by No. 4 and Shell roads, Alderbridge Way and Westminster Highway.
Scores of fire trucks and firefighters raced to the scene to tackle the blaze which, later that evening, had grown to eight hectares in size.
Four fixed-winged airplanes, provided by BC Wildfire Services, and a chopper were also called in to try and douse the fire.
The DND also provided more than a dozen personnel to help combat the blaze and Richmond Fire-Rescue brought in an excavator to create a path to the fire, which was largely inaccessible, with it being about 1,000 feet into the thick, peat woodland.
Experts warned it could burn underground for years. The cause is still unknown.
2019:
Who can forget the furore caused by the City of Richmond deciding to spend $15,000 on a crosswalk on Minoru Boulevard, close to Granville Avenue, in July?
It wasn’t any old crosswalk though, it was festooned in the colours of the rainbow, to show support for the city’s LGBTQ community.
Not everyone liked the idea, however, with some bizarre reasoning offered by some residents at a tense city council meeting, including the concern that some people may avoid using it, for fear of becoming gay.
The Richmond News is not aware of any such transformation coming to pass.
