Jinkies! There's nothing one loves more that a good ghost story. I was guilty of watching "Scooby Doo" 'til my eyes were almost squares and my mother shooed me away from the idiot box Saturday mornings to go outside and play. But with the formula that old Hanna Barbara favourite was based on, it helped me to learn a few things about looking at the supernatural more critically than most kids my age. It's with this knowledge that I have, if I say so myself, solved the mystery sounds of Terrace, BC.
Thursday, August 29th the people of Terrace, British Columbia reported hearing strange sounds. Loud groaning, grinding echoed throughout the valley of this small town, bouncing off the surrounding hills for close to ten minutes. Kimberly Wookey took video at 7.30 a.m. and posted it to Youtube. While there has been much speculation about its origins with everything from Sasquatch mating calls, trains or earthquakes, city spokesperson Alisa Thompson said it was a city worker at the local area grinding down a blade on a grader. Friday morning she issued a statement:
The grader blade needed to be straightened. Kind of gets ground down, and it makes a very strange noise. It's as simple as that.
The video, the YouTube video, is actually right around the corner from the arena, and that's where our employee was doing the straightening.
While that might be the logical solution, I have a slightly more crazy theory. If years of "Scooby Doo" study has taught me anything, it's that an implication of the supernatural is a good red herring with which to distract from a more banal, commercial enterprise, which brings me to the nearby town of Kitimat to the south. It's no surprise that Enbridge would very much like to have their pipeline travel from Alberta to the B.C. coastline, and that has been met with quite a bit of vocal resistance from, well, everyone who doesn't own shares in oil or Enbridge. Mostly the people who stand to get flooded in oil and see nature get tarred in black goo.
I hazard a guess that the noise made at 7:30AM could have been a pipeline being sneakily installed across the landscape, en route to Kitimat where, as a outlet to the Pacific, oil tankers could come and truck oil over the ocean to Asia.
Far-fetched? Not really. When you consider that to the north of Terrace, B.C. ghost town Kitsault was bought for the price of $5 million. Cash.
Once a booming mining town in the 1980's, the company who owned it hoped to mine the nearly 109 million tonnes of molybdenum except that the commodities market crashed, forcing the mine's closure, and everyone moved out.
Now, businessman Krishnan Suthanthiran is hoping to make it it an in-province player in the growing liquid natural gas infrastructure game. Suthanthiran is quoted as saying, "I think with Kitsault Energy, the pipeline will be shorter. The housing infrastructure is there".
Does this mean he plans to have a pipeline extend to the coast, possibly by way of Prince Rupert or Kitimat...?
While this might seem fantastical, keep in mind I'd much rather the sound be that of amorous Sasquatch lovemaking rather than sneaky pipeline infrastructure ground work being laid. I can live with baby Sasquatches, but I'm not sold on pipelines...