Japanese plane crash gets novel treatment

Putting together annual fashion show takes many hard-working hands

A frenzy of activity is taking place behind the closed doors of WAG-Qaumajuq on Monday. It’s the day before Crafted on the Catwalk, the gallery’s annual fashion and design show, and the clock is ticking.

There’s less than 30 hours before the big event and it’s all hands on deck.

A steady stream of people walk in and out of the Memorial Boulevard entrance towards the main hall, which glows in soft hues as technicians test out lighting equipment.

The ground floor is teeming with people lugging chairs and pushing trolleys. A stream of white material unravelling from its roll prompts a shouted “OK to step on this?” and receives an equally loud ‘No!” in reply, voices raised above the metallic buzz of a drill as staff from a local production company put together seats.

Trade war fuelling spike in city costs

A trade war between the U.S. and Canada could cost the City of Winnipeg millions of dollars more than was anticipated during the budget process for this year’s expenditures and beyond.

Japanese plane crash gets novel treatment

Japanese novelist Hideo Yokoyama is new to English readers, but is a regular James Patterson in his home country. The one-time newspaper reporter has won every kind of Japanese-language mystery and crime fiction award in his two decades as a professional novelist.

But this latest release — only his second novel to be translated to English, after 2016’s Six Four — hearkens to Yokoyama’s newsman roots, fictionalizing his own experiences as a local reporter in rural Japan during the 1985 Japan Airlines (JAL) disaster. A staggering 520 people died when a Boeing 757 crashed into the mountains — and it happened right on his doorstep.

Yokoyama aims to transport readers to that time and place, and to experience what he experienced. The decision to write a novel rather than a memoir was a good one; the emotional core is the same, but his well-realized characters and strong thematic throughline, even in translation, are what pull the whole thing together.

The path to clear and honest reporting is not a straightforward one, and in the chaos of the 1985 disaster it is more difficult still. Protagonist Yuuki, a grizzled crime beat veteran, is forced into the task of running the JAL crash desk, which he does initially with great ambivalence. The lone wolf reporter has demons, and leadership has been thrust upon him.

Wind and batteries the best bet

For years, Manitoba Hydro has claimed that we can’t rely on wind turbines during multi-day or even multi-week cold snaps. Although turbines can be equipped with cold-weather packages to operate down to –30 C, as at the St. Leon and St. Joseph wind farms, Hydro routinely warns of the possibility of a lengthy winter wind drought at the same time as electricity use peaks due to high heating demand.

This concern is largely why Hydro is pushing to build a 750 MW fossil gas-fired power plant in Brandon, rather than building more wind farms.

But new analysis by Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, a former energy modeller for Manitoba Hydro, shows that wind-generation reliability well exceeds assumptions and that, if combined with battery energy storage, it could meet even the most bullish load growth forecasts. (These findings were presented to the Public Utilities Board on Aug. 31, and the full report can be found on Climate Action Team Manitoba’s website.)

Hydro’s low estimate of wind generation stems from its erroneous assumption that all new wind farms will be built in the same locations as Manitoba’s two existing wind farms (St. Leon and St. Joseph). Because these two wind farms are only 100 kilometres apart, they have highly correlated wind speeds; when wind conditions are low at one site, they likely are at the other as well. This is not how new wind farms will be built in Manitoba. Instead, they will be located in different areas and use much taller turbines with higher generation potential than the existing wind farms.