With apologies to Silver Bells composers Jay Livingston and Ray Evans:
City street lights, not big-top lights, blink a bright red and green.
B.C. Place Stadium’s two-year-old set of 516 twinkly LED Beacon lights is dark this Christmas. It is not known when or if the roof cable lanterns will grace the Vancouver skyline again.
B.C. Pavilion Corporation CEO Dana Hayden didn’t respond to my request for comment. Spokeswoman Kate Hunter said via email: “we continue to work with the manufacturer to address the issue, which is covered under warranty.”
Bradley Hutchinson, president of original Los Angeles manufacturer En Group Inc., said the warranty on the lights expired in August. “It was a one-year warranty and then we extended it because we had dome some mixups on some issues we had, so we replaced them all,” Hutchinson told me.
What’s more, En Group is no longer.
Hutchinson said he was “expecting a larger project to come to fruition about June of this year, that didn’t ultimately happen, so there was nothing on the horizon. It made more sense to close.”
“We made sure that CDM2 understood some of the internal information, the inside of luminaires so that they would know exactly how to go and replicate with respect to light level and light color and provide a consistency in terms of how the light would look when they needed a replacement light,” Hutchinson said.
CDM2 Lightworks of Vancouver was the project manager. Its president Darren Luce said his company “is currently working with PavCo on a replacement plan for the decorative cable lights. Any further comment regarding the details of that plan will need to come from PavCo.”
(Coincidentally, NPA Coun. Elizabeth Ball has interest in CDM2 via the holding company Lightscene Ventures Inc.)
B.C. Place’s next event is the two-day Contact Winter Music Festival, which will explain all the thumpa-thumpa, oontsa-oontsa electronic dance music and the packs of dehydrated ravers in downtown Vancouver on Dec. 26-27.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest civil trials in British Columbia Supreme Court in 2014 is scheduled to open Feb. 3. Lawyers for B.C. Place cable subcontractor Freyssinet told Justice Gregory Bowden in a pre-trial planning conference on Dec. 20 that the original $6.15 million claim filed in 2011 against structural steel supplier Canam Group is now worth $7.5 million. Canam’s countersuit for cost overruns is $39 million. An attempt at mediation failed. PavCo and general contractor PCL are secondary defendants in the Freyssinet action.
The trial at Vancouver’s Law Courts is scheduled to last 20 weeks.
The Lights were designed for Los Angeles weather.