Firefighting

equipment

The City of Abbotsford is

planning to spend more than $1 million to improve its firefighting equipment.

City council on Monday will be asked to finalize a $555,300 request by the Abbotsford Fire Rescue Service, to buy a new fire engine from Hub Fire Engines and Equipment in Abbotsford

A further $642,000 is requested for a fire engine with a ladder truck, to be purchased from Safetek Emergency Vehicles, of Abbotsford.

Both expenditures are included in the city’s 2009 budget.

Calls for

fishing

closure

The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs have joined local native voices in call for a closure of recreational fishing for chinook salmon in the Fraser River. The shutdown is necessary, they maintain, to save endangered sockeye runs which are coming in far below pre-season estimates, and are further threatened by high water

temperatures that exhaust the fish on the way to their

spawning grounds. The Fraser is closed to sockeye fishing, but chinook fishermen may

accidentally or intentionally take sockeye, say native chiefs.

FRAUD FINE

A Metro Vancouver fraud ring has been ordered by B.C. Supreme Court to pay ICBC

damages and interest totaling more than $600,000 for filing bogus car theft claims in which the vehicles weren’t really

stolen. Several members of the ring handed over 25 vehicles to other conspirators and then reported them as stolen.

While ICBC was paying out the claims, the cars, trucks and SUVs were dismantled, rebuilt or otherwise disguised – often complete with false Vehicle Identification Numbers – and then resold.