Hooray the Fort is gone!!

To those of you in Fort St. John, I know the Fort has been gone for a week, but I'll still happy to see that eyesore finally gone.

However, now that the City has finally figured out who exactly owns the building, or rather, the site of the former Fort Hotel, I wonder, when is it going to be cleaned up? Or at least properly fenced.

It's funny, in a bizarre way - at 5 p.m. on day of the fire, I drove past the Fort, and shook my head at the general deplorable state of the building, and decided I should send an email to one or more of our city councillors, asking when that sad excuse for a fence was going to be replaced with something more substantial. An hour later, my hubby arrived home from work, and told me the Fort was on fire.

But the sad excuse for a fence is still there. And now, the site is probably even more of a public safety hazard. The former hotel is now a pit filled with sodden, charred rubble. God only knows what is buried in the depths of the foundation.

For more than a year, the Fort Hotel has been abandonned. For the past 6 months, it hulked on the corner in the centre of the city, a half-demolished blight on the community. How long are we going to have to look at the blackened remains of this building, surrounded by what is purported to be a fence - what is really a hodge-podge of scraps of plywood and 2x4's - while the City again tries to either buy the property and clean it up, or get the owner to do so?

Tourist season is starting folks - at least get a proper fence around it, before our reputation goes down the gurgler. Communities in Bloom awards notwithstanding, no one is going to want to come to our city, with that pile of crap in the middle of downtown.