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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1484213
ON THE RADAR ( the informer ) W alking or driving by the corner of Cambie Street and 41st Avenue—the former site of the Oakridge shopping centre— you just know that whatever is going on behind the chain-link fencing and the shipping-con- tainer hoarding must be chaos. Seriously: look skyward and there is a disorienting dance of a dozen tower cranes, all hoisting and swinging indepen- dently and somehow not bang- ing into one another. At street level, an army of flag people are waving with equal gusto, warning off cars and cyclists and ushering through a cease- less parade of cement trucks. In the morning, nearly 1,000 workers file in from the Canada Line or from vehicles dispersed across the neighbourhood. And when they all leave in the evening, the whole, burgeoning form looks like it has accumu- lated another layer of concrete and steel. This is the largest construc- tion project in Metro Vancou- ver, likely the largest in Western Canada. When it's done, there will be 14 towers, rising as high as 55 storeys over the second- largest shopping centre in the region. There will be enough retail and office space (810,000 square feet of the latter alone) to qualify this as a second downtown for the City of Van- couver, and there will be some 3 million square feet of residen- tial—including 2,300 condos (many priced at over $2,000 per square foot), as well as 587 units of market rental and 420 of affordable rental. Add to that a 100,000- square-foot community cen- tre, a kilometre-long running track, a two-acre "food hall," and a nine-acre park with more than 1,400 trees (which is the Concrete Solutions A peek behind the fence of Vancouver's largest construction project By Richard Littlemore C ON ST R U C T ION WATER IN; WATER OUT The stuff might fall out of the sky, but even in Vancouver water is too precious a resource to waste. So, Oakridge Park is going to dip into the 195-square- kilometre Quadra Sands aquifer to source water for everything from flushing toilets and wash- ing Teslas to watering trees and gardens in the nine-acre mall-top park. Actually, the term "aquifer" might make you think that Oakridge is perched over a big underground pool or cave; but it's more like a vast bathtub full of saturated sand—the water in which flows beneath Oakridge from the highpoint at Queen Elizabeth Park south toward the Fraser River. Rather than relying exclusively on fresh water drawn and pumped from the North Shore mountains, 15 kilometres away, Oakridge will tap the aquifer, which, added to recycled stormwater, will provide 72 percent of the project's non-potable water, breaking a North American record. That still won't quench the thirst for drinking water—or manage the kind of wastewa- ter that won't sit well on the greenery. For that, Westbank added: 2 KILOMETRES OF NEW STORM SEWERS—6 FEET IN DIAMETER 2 KILOMETRES OF SANITARY SEWERS—2.5 FEET IN DIAMETER 1.5 KILOMETRES OF WATER MAINS—12 INCHES IN DIAMETER TOP: WESTBANK; RIGHT: ISTOCK NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 15 TOWER BLOCK The $4.5-billion Oakridge project led by Vancouver developer Westbank will end with 14 towers over the second-largest shopping centre in the region