ft in\ 2 The Prince George Citizen WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1989 50 CENTS Low tonight: 5 High Thursday: 21 Ann Landers .. .....10 Bridge........ .....23 Business ...... ......9 City, B.C....... .2,3,13 Classified...... Comics........ Crossword..... .....24 Editorial...... Entertainment .....27 Family........ ..10,11 Horoscopes____ .....23 International .. ......7 Lifestyles...... ..10,11 Movies........ .....27 Sports......... ..17-19 Television..... .....25 Living dangerously Disappearing baths TELEPHONE: 562-2441 5 Reserve in crisis Cranes holding own 7 McGriff draws oohs 11 $ mm ROWER-LINE CONCERNS ADDRESSED PRICE OF LAND FOR SOCIAL HOUSING New Expo Scandal' claime "Experience! Are you kidding? I’ve had 12 jobs this year alone!" by Canadian Press VANCOUVER - The city is negotiating to buy former Expo 86 property for social housing at about three times the price that Concord Pacific Developments paid the provincial government for it, says B.C. Liberal Leader Gordon Wilson. Wilson called the sale a scandal, but Mayor Gordon Campbell said Tuesday even if the city pays three times the original purchase price, it is a "an incredible deal.” "The province released the land at somewhere between $10 and $12 a buildable foot and now they’re allowing Concord to sell back to the city at three times the cost,” said Wilson. “It’s the scandal of the century.” Concord, owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, paid about $320 million for the Crown-owned 84-hectare Expo site, a prime: downtown location on the shores cf False Creek. Critics of the deal maintain Concord got the land, a former industrial site, for a song. City council approved rezoning for the first phase of Concord’s development plan last June, despite concern that low-income residents may not be able to afford rentals in the 20 per cent of tfle project earmarked for so-called" non-niar-ket housing. Current negotiations centre on a portion of International Village, a 4.3-hectare site near Chinatown. The development would include 240,000 square metres of residential space, 150,000 square metres of commercial-retail space and a 4C0-room hotel. * No deal has been made yet with the city and negotiations over the price of land are continuing, Craig Aspinall, a spokesman for Concord Pacific, said Tuesday There “is no time frame” for completing such negotiations, which have been under way for the last year, he said. "This is old news,” he said. "Concord has been committed from the beginning to make 20 per cent (of the land) available for social housing and we’ve been having discussions with the city over the terms.” Speaking to reporters after a council meeting Tuesday night, Campbell said he hadn’t heard the $30 per square foot figure used. But he said even at that price, the property would be a bargain. "I can tell you that the value of that (area) is about half the market value of the property,” he said. "The day we enter into that agreement we’ll make 100 per cent on our money.” Concord Pacific is also footing the bill for millions of dollars worth of streets, sewers, schools, parks, and a walkway along False Creek, Campbell said. “What we’re doing now is a dramatic departure from what the city has done in the past,” he said, referring to the unusual degree of co-operation between the city and a private developer. Burns Leak© family missing A Burns Lake family which hasn’t been heard from in more than four weeks has been reported missing, Prince George RCM1J said today. RCMP said Ronald and Doreen Jack, both 26, and their children Ryan, 4, and Russel, 9, were reported missing by Ronald’s father Aug. 25. He has not heard from them since Aug. 1, when they had left their home to find work in the Cluculz Lake area. The last contact anyone had with the family was when Ronald told his father he had a job working south of Cluculz Lake for eight days. Police don’t know how the family was travelling. Inquiries about the family have been made ifi outlying detachments with no results. “It is possible he found further employment and hasn’t bothered to phone home,” said an RCMP spokesman. RCMP are asking anyone with information about the family to contact them. by MALCOLM CURTIS Staff reporter B.C. Hydro has set up a toll-free telephone number to handle inquiries and possible health concerns about its proposed new high-voltage power line from Prince George to Clinton. The utility officially confirmed Tuesday its plans for the 330-kilometre, 500-kilovolt line to carry power from Alcan’s Kemano completion project to the Lower Mainland by 1994. Residents on Vancouver Island protested about health hazards trom electrical transmission wires and tried to block a 230-kilovolt line to a pulp mill in Gold River, B.C. Dave Read, Hydro’s community relations co-ordinator, said a hearing in Courtenay concluded health risks are "not substantiated” by research and the Vancouver Island line is now in operation. “But we are providing information so people can make up their own minds,” Read said Tuesday. The line is to parallel Highway 97, starting from Prince George east of the highway, crossing it at several points, and running west of the highway south of Williams Lake, he said. Hydro is making studies of the issue available at libraries in l Prince George and other communi-ties between here and Clinton, Read said. "One of the complaints we heard on Vancouver Island when people went to look for information was that there were no sources of information on the subject.” Canadian Press has reported a 1982 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed power station operators had 2Vi times the death rate from all types of cancer. Researchers, however, generally believe more work is needed before reaching concrete conclusions. Hydro believes the $178-million line (up from previous estimates of $136 million) won’t have any serious impact. Read noted that it will be built alongside two existing 500-kilovolt and one 250-kilovolt line following a right-of-way that avoids heavily settled areas. "In terms of the people who live close to it, there are really very few.” Animal grazing is the primary use of land affected by the new power line, he said. Hydro is meeting next month with interest groups like the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association, the B.C. Wildlife Federation, community associations, Indian bands, and landowners to discuss the project. As well, it is planning public meetings in the next two months, although a schedule hasn’t been finalized. The Crown utility is submitting an application soon to the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum Resources for an Energy Project certificate. If the application is approved, Hydro plans to re-survey the required right-of-way next year. The line was originally included as part of the Site C project on the Peace River in 1981 but was postponed because of declining electrical demands. Read said it will be able to handle power both from Alcan’s Kemano expansion project and from Site C. See POWER LINE, page 2 Business was brisk today at the College of New Caledonia when these students lined up in the college Signing up gymnasium to register for their fall programs. No registration figures are available, but the college anticipates the number of students attending in Sep- tember will be higher than the 1,200 full-time and 636 part-time students who registered in September, 1988. Registration continues at the college until 7 p.m. today. Citizen photo by Brock Gable AND NOW, THE GALAXY legacy is something you’ll never imagine without looking at it,” U.S. Geological Survey geologist Laurence Soderblom said Tuesday at a final news briefing on Voyager. At Neptune, Voyager discovered six moons in addition to Nereid and Triton, which were first detected from Earth. It discovered three thin rings of debris and two broad rings orbiting the planet. It found at least six moonlets hidden in one ring. Voyager detected in Neptune’s bluish atmosphere an Earth-size swirling storm called the Great Dark Spot, 1,158 kilometre an hour winds, photochemical smog, invisible ultraviolet auroras and cirrus clouds of natural gas casting shadows on clouds far below. It also revealed two types of ice volcanoes on frosty, pinkish Triton: 300-metre-deep craters measuring hundreds of kilometres across that once produced ocean-size floods of ice flowing like lava, and volcanoes that may be active today, ejecting nitrogen ice 40 kilometres high at speeds of 900 kh. Scientists presented new findings Tuesday showing Neptune’s weak, tilted magnetic field doesn’t go through the centre of the planet but is offset about four-tenths of the way toward the surface. Voyager 2 keeps looking back at Neptune until Oct. 2. TTien, like Voyager 1, it will collect information about particles and magnetic fields in space and search for the edge of the solar system, sending Earth information until about 2020. Then, carrying copper videodisks of pictures and recorded sounds of Earth, the Voyagers will spend billions of years orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. Perhaps one day an alien civilization will find one of the Voyagers and play the record. If they do, they’ll hear a simple message recorded by a seven-year-old boy from another time and another world: “Greetings from the children of the planet Earth.” Voyager leaves priceless Fourteen separate Voyager images of Neptune’s moon Triton. Jupiter and Saturn before hurtling toward the stars. And what did these humble Voyagers, these piles of 1960s electronics, do for their human masters, for the U.S. taxpayers who paid the equivalent of $1 billion Cdn to propel them to the outer planets? "The immediate benefits of Voyager’s pictures of Neptune and Triton and their wealth of scientific information is to stimulate our intellects and to nourish our souls,” said Bruce Murray, president of the Planetary Society and former director of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Admin-stration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory- "But surely over the coming generations those arcane facts will become relevant to our destiny on Earth, just as earlier arcane facts from Venus and Mars are now considered vital to our destiny. “ Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan said: “If you want to understand Earth, go look at other worlds.” From Mariner and the space were used to produce this picture probe Pioneer, scientists studied how Venus’s thick clouds trap solar heat, warming the planet to 482 degrees Celsius in a runaway “greenhouse effect.” That discovery helped alert scientists to how industrial air pollutants threaten to warm Earth, flooding coastal areas and triggering droughts and starvation. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina first warned of the depletion of Earth’s ozone layer after using chemical formulas devised to help NASA understand Venus’s atmosphere, Sagan said. Sagan and other planetary scientists developed the theory that smoke from nuclear war could plunge Earth into a dark, cold nuclear winter and cause mass starvation of those who survived the exchange of warheads. "The idea ultimately evolved from our attempt to understand the great Martian dust storm of 1971-72,” which was detected by Mariner 9 and chilled Mars’s already cold surface, Sagan said. "The lesson we’re learning is that the complexity of the universe by LEE SIEGEL PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Far in the cold darkness beyond Neptune, a lonely Voyager speeds into the void, dozens of worlds in its wake as it leaves a legacy that may aid the survival of its home planet, a garden island in a sea of space. What wonders Voyager 2 witnessed as the one-tonne spacecraft cruised the solar system, traversing an arc-shaped seven-billion-ki-lometre path in 12 years as it trekked past four planets and at least 56 moons: ■ In 1979, Jupiter and its moon Io, a hellish satellite of sulphur-spewing volcanoes. ■ Saturn and its graceful rings in 1981. ■ Five years later, Uranus, knocked on its side by some incomprehensible collision. ■ And today, the probe is eight million kilometres past deep blue Neptune, with its frozen volcanic moon Triton, once flooded by seas of icy lava. Such marvels, such sights never before seen by human eyes, were returned to Earth in 81,000 photographs captured by television cameras aboard Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, which explored