6 - Wednesday, September 19, 1990 - North Shore News HELLO BRIANE... WE STILL NEED TWO MORE SOPRANOS AND A BASS... INSIGHTS NEWS VIEWPOINT No, tanks! HILE THE North Shore joins the race to protect the environ- ment, there is some serious work to do literally in our own backyards. A recent West Vancouver investigation into abandoned Residential Underground Storage Tanks (RUSTs) found that 750 of 950 homes visited had abandoned tanks on site. Of the tanks found, a whopping 87 per cent contained amounts of abandoned oil ranging from five to 250 gallons. The findings in West Vancouver Dose a sexsious enough environmental ihreat in themselves, but when they are applied to the rest of the North Shore, the seriousness of that threat to surrounding ecosystems mushrooms. An estimated 50,000 RUSTs are buried around the Lower Mainland, many of them installed in the ’50s and *60s, and a high percentage of them buried on the North Shore. The maximum lifespan of the steel tanks is 25 vears, after which time they begin to rot and release their fuel into the en- vironment. Fuel from RUSTs contaminates ground water, area creeks and tke soil itself. Owners of abandoned RUSTs in West Vancouver are being asked to have their tanks filled with sand er removed. But there is no indication that action is being taken to enforce the cleanup. It is time the other two North Shore municipalities followed West Vancouver's example and surveyed their own com- munities to identify sites with RUSTs, as well as ensuring that these tanks are safely sealed or removed. As the environmentalists say, start in your own backyard. LETTER OF THE DAY Make intersections safer Dear Editor, {t's hard to take ICBC’s Ken Hardie (Auto Topic, Aug. 17) seriously. According 10 him, only 17 per cent of accidents involving injury or death had speeding as a contributing factor, but he spends the rest of his article making us believe that if we only slowed down everything would be O.K. Well, what about the other 83 per cent? Publisher . Associate Editor . envelope ...Peter Speck Managing Editor Timothy Renshaw Noe! Wright Advertising Director Linda Stewart North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an independent suburban newspaper and quahitied uncer Schedute 11. Paragraph Ill of the Excise Tax Act. is publisned each Wednesday. Friday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Ltd and disinbuted to every door on the Norih Shore Second Class Mai Registration Number 3885 Subscnptans Noch and West Vancouver, $25 per year Mailing rates avasiable on request Submusstons are welcome but we canncl accep! responsibility tor unsolicited Matenal enciuding Manuscupts ang pictures a which should be accompafued by a Stamped, addressed It’s not hard to guess what they are. Chief among them must be tailgating, going through red lights and stop signs, and careless left turns and lane changes. Almost 56 per cent of all acci- dents occur in intersections resulting in 18,000 injuries and more than 176 fatalities, B.C.- wide, in 1988. Clearly, we don’t need another “major crackdown on speeders’’ Tek VOICE GF MONTH END WEST VANCOUVER: SUNDAY - WEONESDAY + eIDAY 1139 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, 8.C. V7M 2H4 §9,170 (average, Wednesday Friday & Sunday) <=> SDA DIVISION Display Advertising Classified Advertising Newsroom Distribution Subscriptions North Snore owned and managed unless the easy tickets and extra revenues are the only objectives. Nor do we need more platitudes and slogans from Mr. Hardie. What we do need is a major ef- fort in making intersections safer. I would recommend that and Motoreycle Awareness Programs to Mr. Hardie’s considerable writ- ing skills. H. Schmid North Vancouver 980-0511 986-6222 985-2131 986-1337 986-1337 985-3227 MEMBER Entire contents © 1990 North Shore Free Press Ltd All sights reserved. NDP drops the other shoe on B.C. Socreds GARY FILMON'’S Tories scraped home to a slim majority in last week’s Manitoba election. But ‘‘nationally’’ the clear victors were the New Democrats. Hot on the heels of the stunn- ing NDP sweep in Oniario, Gary Doer's trouncing of Sharon Carstairs’ Liberals must have na- tional NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin dancing by the light of the moon. In Saskatchewan Roy Romanow is poised to polish off Grant Devine’s Tories. In B.C. Mike Harcourt’s ‘‘socialist horde’’ is raring to go. In Ottawa itself the NDP future never looked brighter. Federal Liberals under their almost invisible new leader, Jean Chretien, are mumbling and fumbling on all the vital issues — the GST, free trade and the defi- cit. Anglo Canada found them half-;carted in opposing Meech Lake, while Quebec curses them for killing it. Any resemblance to a viable alternative government is purely numerical. With tho Mulroney gang despis- ed —- when not loathed — bya large majority of Canadians, is the impossible unfolding? Are Ontario’s Bob Rae and Manitoba’s Gary Doer the crest of an NDP tidal wave about to engulf anglo Canada, where cynicism about BOTH oild-line parties is solidifying into a na- tional consensus? Could Audrey McLaughlin even be Canada’s first woman prime minister? One answer almost certainly lies with the new Ontario premier. Now firmly in charge of Canada’s wealthiest and most populous province, Bob Rae will be the lit- mus test of the NDP’s ability to govern in a free enterprise society. Probably most Canadians respect the NDP’s idealism, its traditional role as a national “conscience”? and the numerous social security measures it has helped bring about even as a mi- nority party. But are New Democrats capable of MANAGING the public’s af- fairs without raping the taxpayer and/or bankrupting the econonty? Experience in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and B.C. has done little so far to answer that nagging question. Few parallels exist between the B.C. and Ontario situations. Whatever the Socreds’ sins, they’re no lackeys of Ottawa, which they’re actively fighting over the hated GST, Senate reform and general short-changing of the west. Environment Minister John Reynolds is winning respect among B.C.’s highly politicized “‘greens.’’ And the Vander Zalm government's economic manage- ment record is not seriously challenged — a bread-and-butter factor for voters with no happy Noel Wright Ey HITHER AND YON memories of Dave Barrett’s brief NDP regime in the 1970s. Even so, the psychological! ef- fect of TWO major NDP trium- phs in a week cannot now be ig- nored. If Bob Rae’s Ontario gov- ernment quickly shows that it knows what it's doing, it might well tempt British Columbians to risk finding out if Mike Har- court's NDP has also improved with keeping over the past 15 years. To Socreds that's a reason both for and against a fall election; in which only one thing would be certain: the closing time of the polling stations! whe WRAP-UP: True green Socreds are paying $125 a head to ‘recycle a valuable resource’’ — the slogan for Environment Minister John Reynolds’ gala fundraising dinner Oct. 2 at Vancouver Trade & Convention Centre. Call 926-6616 to book ... Speaker at the North Van Chamber of Commerce lunch tomorrow, Sept. 20, in the North Shore Winter Club is witty Canada Wide Magazines publisher Peter Legge ... Congrats to Marianne and Gloria Thomson of Writings, Park Royal, the first Canadian silver award winners in New York’s continent-wide Gift and Decorative Accessories com-~ petition ... Many happy returns tomorrow, Sept. 20, to North Van birthday girls Joan LeBlonde and Pam Weseen ... And also tomor- row, a 57th anniversary bouquet to West Van's Dr. Donald and ‘“*Torchy”’ King. kkk WRIGHT OR WRONG: Learn from the mistakes of others — you can’t possibly live long enough to make them ail yourself. photo Nei! Lucente “POINT!"’...Brenda Lorenz (left), director of Seymour Heights School of Dance, puts budding Margot Fonteyns through their paces at the school’s new home at 808 Lytton.