Residents of one West Kelowna, B.C., neighbourhood couldn’t help but notice an obnoxious addition to the hillside across the lake last fall.
“There were always three towers with lights that stay on all the time, but these ones were blinking non stop, in a one, two, three pattern, and on a clear night it would literally outshine the moon. It was horrible,” Ryan Holt, president of the Casa Loma Community Association, said.
It was affecting some people’s ability to sleep but they hoped it would be a short-lived problem.
“We thought they were temporary,” Holt said.
But then time marched and months later, they were still being aggravated by the blinking lights that turned out to be a Bell radio tower.
Nobody Holt spoke to knew what they were, so he kept making inquiries, eventually ending up at the Kelowna International Airport. There, he tracked someone down in hopes they could shed some light on the already blindingly bright situation.
That’s where he learned that Transport Canada’s changing regulation prompted Bell Media to upgrade the lights on their towers. Initially, reaching out to them had little effect so Holt contacted West Kelowna’s mayor and MP Dan Albas looking for help, and that made a difference.
Albas said he made a request to Bell on behalf of the municipality and Bell was open to looking into it.
The regulations, Albas said, were from Transport Canada but because the tower was pre-existing, Bell found out they could dim the lights.
Albas said it was an example of how well things could go when different levels of government collaborate.
Holt said it was just a relief.
“It’s drastic,” he said, estimating that the lights now are one-tenth the brightness they were at the beginning of summer.
“Now they are still bright enough, but totally acceptable. That Transport Canada rule went too far.”
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