In Depth. What Do We Do With Sarnia Airport. Louis Shalako.

Eighteen passengers, on a good day.

Louis Shalako

What would happen if we gave up Sarnia Airport?

Would we ever be able to replace it? 

How much passenger traffic would it take to sustain Sarnia Airport at a break-even or even profitable level? How much does it even cost, and is there any benefit, in sustaining the thing in limbo for any great length of time. Is there any potential for that sustainable level of air traffic in the local market, barring any great increase in the local population, which doesn’t seem very likely in the short term.

The population of Sarnia and Sarnia-Lambton has been stable, if not stagnant, for many years. We do have a sizable population of foreign students, who may or may not stick around for the longer term. Foreign students are, for the most part, not buying five or six hundred thousand dollar new-build homes, and they don’t take affordable, geared-to-income housing because they aren’t eligible. What they do take, are apartments, in the lower range of the scale in terms of pricing. They take them for the short term, which means when they vacate landlords can take a look at the local going rate and jack the rents accordingly.

How much land is involved in the operation of Sarnia Airport. What happens if the airport loses any certifications that it might have. What are the chances of any major or smaller air-carrier bringing passenger or charter flight services to the Sarnia area? How long can we hang on, waiting for such an outcome.

If we closed Sarnia Airport to any flight operations at all, what would we do with it? Is there any real chance of replacing Sarnia Airport, in some other location, at some future date. That doesn’t seem very likely. Where else would you put it, and if there really are economic benefits, how would we like seeing those benefits going to a neighbouring municipality.

Use it or lose it, in other words.

What value does private flying, what value does a small flight school, what economic or social benefit, or any other public good does that bring to the municipality. If they lost the privilege, where would all the private pilots and flight students go?

What upgrades would be required to bring Sarnia Airport up to snuff, in order to attract any air carrier to the Sarnia area. Where is the demand. Back in the 1960s, ‘Great Lakes Aviation’ operated air services, flying DC-3s of WW II vintage on short, regional routes. These were twin-engine tail-draggers of about 28 passengers. This was superseded by ‘Air Ontario’, flying Convair 440 aircraft; piston-engine, twin-engine aircraft with nose-wheel landing gear. Those were good for 52 passengers, they were noisy, nearing the end of their service life, and no doubt expensive to maintain.

For some years, small, twin-engine turbine aircraft provided the service, for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the company…

In a personal note, my buddy Bill Stone and I rode our little banana bikes out to the airport, from the Bright St. and Germain Park area, when we were twelve or thirteen years old. (It was summer and we fished for catfish and suckers out there in Wawanosh Drain as well.) We went into the ‘new’ terminal and got an airline schedule from the nice lady behind the counter…the security guard sort of grinned and shook his head when he saw us coming. I guess you could say we liked aircraft. We rode out there to see them landing and taking off. It’s probably a good thing our parents didn’t know too much about all this—

The cockpit of the Convair 440.

***

Late on many a hot summer night, with the windows open, laying in bed, one could hear the bigger planes landing at Sarnia Airport. They would put the propellers into reverse pitch, pushing full throttle, in order to brake on the relatively short runway—rather than plunge off the NW end of the runway and fall into Wawanosh Drain. We used to go out there and cluster at the end of the runway when Canada’s Snowbirds came and went, although it has been a while…considering the age of the Tudor training aircraft, perhaps that is understandable. Our age, too.

Some of this was before the opening of the Highway 402 in about 1980. Traffic between Sarnia and London meant travelling on the two-lane, very narrow Highway 22, which did have one centre passing lane—one result of which was head-on collisions when folks misjudged the distance and the speed. This community doesn’t support the costs of passenger rail traffic, it all has to be subsidized at a loss, and one wonders about the intercity bus service as well. It’s all very well to read about it or see it on the evening news. What is it like to actually ride upon it…??? Ten or eleven people on a train going one hundred kilometres, isn’t very profitable, or ticket prices quickly become prohibitive.

***

How much would all that cost, and would the economic, spin-off benefits offset those costs.

This holds true for any form of transportation service.

What would happen if an actual cruise ship, actually docked in Sarnia Harbour…and what would that actually do for downtown…???

What would it do for Bright’s Grove. This is where most of our politicians live, after all.

The real question we need to ask ourselves here, is what would this do for Bright's Grove.

What alternative uses might the existing airport footprint support, bearing in mind Badger Daylighting and other services onsite, and bearing in mind present and future zoning requirements. How does this all fit into the official plan?

Surrounding the airport are areas zoned for agriculture, commercial and light industrial. There are farms and residences along Telfer Road, Michigan Avenue and Blackwell Road. There are businesses along London Line, including the municipal business park.

How would they be affected by major changes to the site, and how would that be perceived. They’ve lived with it this long, what would they think if the land was sold off for some major industrial operation? It is the largest single parcel of land in the city--it is available, in some sense.

Some kind of mega battery or EV plant might fit there—only problem there is, we still lose the airport and the NIMBYs would be well and truly out for blood…

Backtracking just a little bit, there is plenty of room already, for middle-class and high-end housing development.  Called Zone 2, it’s in the official plan. An increase in development land near Bright’s Grove has been rejected the last I have heard. Any form of affordable, geared-to-income housing will be a hard sell in any neighbourhood, this in spite of all the efforts of ineffectual do-gooders, (sandals-wearing, shorts-wearing, floral shirts-wearing, weak and ineffectual, slightly-incompetent socialist bureaucrat-gender-tag-wearing people), going down on the riverbank and burning candles in order to raise awareness of the need to reduce stigma, which they have just reinforced with the success in getting front-page coverage with what is an otherwise bogus endeavour…to put that sort of development in an area that is ‘desirable’, merely rubs salt in the wounds of the long-suffering bourgeoisie. Who, as we all know, have been having it pretty rough lately.

We already have thousands of approvals, very few of which represent ‘shovels in the ground’. Many of them have simply been forgotten.

Perhaps the Ineos/Styrolutions site will come available soon, and of course this is much more suitable when you consider the encampment at Rainbow Park, and the fact that the intersection of Tashmoo and Churchill Road/Highway 40 is so much closer to the addictions and mental health services people require—or does that sound snarky. We could always bus them in—the social workers, I mean.

We could always nail up a sign and call it a ‘leper colony’, or ‘Free Gaza’, or ‘Ford City’, or something like that.

It’s crazy enough, it might just work. Why, that big old airport can house any number of homeless people, in tiny little fibreglass veal-calf sheds, or maybe we could just put in a few hundred McMansions for the Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis’s of this world.

 

END

They just liked aircraft.

Badger Daylighting.

So, here’s this story where Council was looking to sell Sarnia Airport.

Here’s a Master Plan for Sarnia Airport. Be prepared for your bum to fall asleep.

This link is from 2018. Some Canadian journalist really ought to follow up.

Okay,leaving Sarnia for Toronto at 8:40 a.m. $48.00VIA rail. One would hope there is some kind of return ticket—

Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms. Because you never know when you’re going to fish in Wawanosh Drain.

DC-3A Great Lakes Aviation.

Scottsdale Aviation.

The Sarnia Airport claims hundreds of thousands of trips in 2019. This seems like nonsense, what is a ‘catchment area’ and how can the local population produce 472,000 trips.

The last air carrier at Sarnia Airport operated aircraft very similar to the Jetstream.

Images. Top photo. Alan Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories abounding upon Amazon.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Go Deep: What Would Happen if Imperial Oil Left Sarnia? Louis Shalako.

The Sarnia site, the St. Clair River in the background. Photo from CanadianFuels website.

Louis Shalako

“To engage in idle speculation is the mark of a free man.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero.

What would happen if Imperial Oil shut down their Sarnia plant and moved production elsewhere?

This article relies on sheer speculation.

However, there is some evidence, not so much of their intentions, as for an ongoing process.

The company recently took down the big smokestack, visible for some miles when entering the city along Confederation Street.

The old tool crib, machine shop and warehouse building is gone. Old oil tanks, the ones that appeared to have been constructed of large ceramic blocks, are gone. The bottling plant, built in the 1980s, which was meant to bottle the new-at-the-time synthetic oils, is gone. As an employee of a company in the industrial door business, we supplied hollow metal doors and frames for that plant. I knew a guy who drove a big rig. All he did was move trailers around the property—empty trailers go up to the loading dock, full trailers are pulled out and lined up in rows for the ‘real’ truckers who would take them on from there.

The Esso ‘low density polyethylene’ plant, across Vidal Street from the refinery proper, also built in the 1980s, appears to be largely gone—it’s kind of hard to say for sure, from looking at Google Maps, but the street grid, all behind wire and on private property, has some empty blocks. Google Maps isn't always very up-to-date. Those blocks show signs of something being taken away, perhaps storage tanks, perhaps redundant production units. We supplied many, many overhead doors for a train loading dock and factory area. We supplied doors, frames and hardware for the plant. Going on forty year-old memories is not very reliable. It might be better to say that I just don’t know about that one and cannot find any confirmation online.

Imperial Oil has taken out a number of storage tanks, which used to be to the west of south Indian Road. Historically, the company operated a small fleet of tankers, plying the Great Lakes. Nowadays, fuels are mostly transported by rail, by road, or by pipeline.

Now, the provincial government has halted production at the Ineos/Styrolution plant due to high benzene emissions, and just the other day, the federal government issued an order for all Chemical Valley plants to reduce benzene emissions.

The tanks in the centre of the photo are gone...

The Imperial Oil refinery is historical. It is the oldest oil refinery in Canada, maybe even the world, but the focus of those activities has shifted to a large extent to western Canada.

There’s a lot more competition these days. There are also two or three other refineries locally, Shell and Suncor, and the one on Plank Road which used to be Dome Petroleum. Now it is 'Plains-Midstream', whatever the hell that means.

With a large footprint, and a fair bit of open space, a refinery can be rebuilt, it can be upgraded, a newer plant could simply be built on the same property—there is a power generation plant onsite. Those no longer rely on coal, all such plants locally, have been converted to gas. That being said, there is nothing to stop the company from shutting down much of the plant, maybe even most of the plant, and keeping a few such assets in play. The local operation could sell power into the grid, or to other Chemical Valley operations. One, specialized unit could produce one, specialized feedstock for local customers. There was a news story where the Shell refinery was up for sale. I forget the price, something like $250 million. There were no takers—no one wanted it.

Most recently, Imperial Oil announced a rationalization plan, with the result that the Research Centre is shutting down locally, with operations to be transferred to the southern U.S. Their all-weather simulator, built back in the 1980s, where vehicles and lubricants were tested in arctic and high-temperature conditions, (using the new synthetic oil) would now appear to be redundant…it was a source of pride at the time, as was their new synthetic oil product line.

There are signs, the problem is how to interpret them.

It is true, that the plant is close to eastern markets. This is relevant when it comes to gasoline, diesel and jet-type fuels, which are more akin to good old kerosene. It is also true that the fate of Line 5, which crosses the Straits of Mackinac, the State of Michigan, and the St. Clair River, remains up in the air pending court rulings and no doubt subsequent appeals. What would happen to Chemical Valley as a whole if Line 5 was shut down. Bearing in mind the new Nova plant in St. Clair Township will rely on feedstocks from some source, what would happen if any one of their major suppliers were to shut down. That plant represents a $2.5 billion investment or thereabouts.

***

Louis. Going deep on pure speculation. Yet the conclusion is obvious...

Historically, plants and factories have come and gone. Prestolite in Point Edward manufactured electric coils and windings for electric motors and devices related to the auto industry. Holmes Foundry was a subsidiary of American Motors, taken over when AMC became part of Chrysler. When the plant was shut down, the site was mostly dismantled, with the eastern end looking like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with partially-demolished buildings and overgrown with trees and scrub. A friend’s first job was at a place called Mueller Brass, where he was a ‘nipple-polisher’, according to him. The company made brass fittings for the auto and hardware industry.

Fibreglas Canada is gone. The small, old-fashioned plant produced several types of pink and white wool insulation, as well as acoustic ceiling tiles and pipe insulation. Production was simply moved south of the border. The old Polysar, a Crown Corporation formed in early World War Two to produce synthetic rubber, was broken up, with various elements taken over by NOVA, Bayer and BASF to my own recollection. Many of those units have been decommissioned although some industrial operations continue on the site. The Ineos/Styrolutions plant is, in fact, the old Polysar Butyl II and Styrene II plants under new management—and yes, I helped build those plants too.

Dow Chemical decommissioned their Sarnia facility after seventy years in Chemical Valley, although the company has returned to the area with an operation in Corunna.

The Ontario Hydro coal-fired generating plant has been demolished. Welland Chemical, in response to a strike, packed up and left in the middle of the night or so it seemed. The old Ethyl Corporation used to produce lead additives for fuel—a changing regulatory environment pretty much killed leaded fuels, and some other company may have taken over certain assets which may have been useful or adaptable to their own needs. Holmes Insulation was taken over by a Finnish company, and then somebody else, and it’s one of those sites which seems barely active on a casual drive-by.

Coca-Cola had a tiny little bottling plant near the intersection of Indian Road and Confederation Street. The building is still there, behind the Tim Horton’s. The small size gives an easy answer as to why it is gone: it was simply more efficient to produce the product in a larger plant, somewhere else, and truck the product into town (or to a distribution centre), from there.

In light of global climate change, it is simply inevitable that certain refining operations must fall by the wayside, somewhere, someday.

The oldest refinery in Canada might very well be gone in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years. It will almost certainly be gone in thirty.

END

Imperial Oil Research Moving to U.S. (Sarnia News Today)

Imperial to Begin Demolition of Stack. (Sarnia Journal)

Oil Blending and Packing Operation to Close. (Sarnia Observer)

Shell Refinery Sale Plan Scrapped. (Reuters)

Tower Falls at Imperial Oil Sarnia. (Global News)

No Charges for Imperial Oil Despite Massive Fire. (Global News)

Feds Extend Benzene Restrictions for Two Years. (National Observer)

About the author. 

Once upon a time, Louis Shalako worked for Bice Specialties, Wilding Industrial Doors, and Cecco, (briefly), in the industrial doors trade. He worked for C.H. Heist, mostly in industrial vacuum work as well as high-pressure water-blasting. He spent ten weeks on the end of a shovel, hand-digging around pipes and cables, working for Dow Chemical in their Utility/Construction labour force. He worked for Lyndon Security, working a gate at the Shell Marketing Terminal and one or two other places. As an unarmed, uniformed security guard, Louis picked up the weekly mail pouch from Holmes Foundry and took it over the river to the Port Huron Michigan Post Office, which saved the company a day or two on mail delivery. The fun part was, they provided a Jeep Cherokee owned by the company for the trip. (Bridge fare was still fifty cents back then.) As a cab driver, he delivered overtime meals to company gates and drove workers all over the county, after overtime, having missed their car-pool. He worked for Fibreglas Canada for about a year and worked the Cabot Carbon strike as a security guard in 1986. He has been in and out of every plant in the valley as well as many other industrial operations in southern Ontario cities and towns.

 

Louis has books and stories in ebook and audiobook format available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Algorithms, and How to Get One Million Hits On Your Blog. Louis Shalako.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stuff them keywords...

Louis Shalako

A recent story (BBC I think), noted that Google had diddled the algorithms and killed a lot of traffic to established websites. My latest story has a grand total of 25 reads or hits.

Over fourteen years, the site has garnered 961 k hits. My first blog post wasn't very good.

It took a week to get a handful of hits, some of which might have been indexing bots or even my own reads, which can be managed through the site. But this is why I think people quit blogging. They have a dozen or so stories up, and they don't keep it up because it looks like it isn't working. Looking at the big spikes in the graph: someone adjusted their algorithms and I got 60,000 hits from France in a few months. (Page bottom). The next big spike, came out of nowhere, and traffic was unusually high at a time when I really wasn't doing much with the blog, although I routinely repost old stories. I routinely repost online serial content, including Heaven Is Too Far Away.

I'm the only guy I know who does online serial fiction. I was probably the first, and possibly the last, to serialize a manuscript before the book was even finished...

Once you have the content, (and my blog is close to 1,200 posts), you can recycle it in various ways. You can also update the links, fix a typo, add photos, etc. I hope to have one million hits sooner rather than later—I had hoped by summer, but things have definitely slowed down, for whatever reason.

When I get a million hits, I'm going to call up the newspaper—

I have scraped my own blog for a new ebook or short story. An example would be One Million Words of Crap, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play. 

Lately, I am replacing Smashwords links with sites that are still up and running as ebook aggregators, yes; I have paperbacks and audiobooks as well. I found out about Smashwords on Facebook. As I said, when I repost a story, I can update as well. I can take out dead links and add in a new one.

Smashwords and Draft2Digital have merged and the books will surface over there in a month or two.

Scary shit for beginners.

When you go to edit an old story on Blogger, the interface might show the code. People take one look at that and it’s “…fuck. I can’t do that—”

Well, just so you know, for the first six months, I didn’t even know what a tag was. The site can be a bit glitchy at times, but just keep hacking away and you will get it. When formatting, it's hack, hack, hack, then preview. Save, then hack some more...confidence is everything, and patience is everything else.

On the upper left, click on ‘compose mode’ and its back to the old familiar interface. Just a quick pro tip, I compose in a Word doc and that way I can control the font size. There are just a lot more tools in the doc format. I prefer 13-pt Times New Roman. I copy and paste from the doc file.

It was at Genrecon, held at the Sarnia Library in 2009 where I met Douglas Smith. I cornered him for a minute and introduced myself and all of that. He is the one who suggested a couple of things. One was to join Facebook. The other was to try a free blog from Blogger. And we all know how that went.

When I signed up for Facebook, one of the first things I said was: “Whoever invented this is a genius.”

And I was right, too.

The blog is fairly flexible. You can change themes, change colours and fonts. Click around on all the buttons in order to figure out what to do. The widgets are handy, as you can see from the right-hand column. I had to fight for quite some time to get Google to take ads off of the blog. They were telling me that I had some kind of problem with the blog, and they weren’t paying me for blog hits. I said, if you’re not paying for blog hits, please take the ads off of my blog. I will never see a penny of it anyways. In fourteen years of blogging, they owe me $25.88 and the threshold for payment is $100.00. If you’re in this for the money, you might want to prepare for a little disappointment…and a few spammers in the comment section.

'Compose mode' is a lot more civilized.

Their help pages are impenetrable. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they wanted me to do, and I did provide feedback, more than once, to exactly no response whatsoever.

You can stuff keywords into your posts, but a handful of tags will do nicely.

You might read Active Versus Passive Blogging.

The best thing you can do is to produce regular, interesting, helpful and informative content. Entertain the people. Sing for your supper. As for myself, I do enjoy the work, and that is always something.

Right. And if I die, and if Google gets to keep my $25.88, then I guess that’s what the service was worth. In other words, not much, but the actual blog is what you make of it. My most popular story is Ghost Planet, with over twelve thousand reads...over ten or twelve years. I won't stick in a link for that one. If you would like to take a look at it...you will have to Google it.

(Tricky, Louis. - ed.)

(Yes, but it might also work.)

And, in the meantime, it is a useful promotional tool.

#Louis

END

Click on the image to enlarge.

From the BBC: Google's New Algorithm.

The website of Douglas Smith.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

See his works on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.