Downtown residents are appealing to the city and Bosa Development to put them out of their misery and minimize noise from pile driving.

Bosa Development recently began working on the Pier West site at 660 Quayside Dr., where 43- and 53-storey highrises will be built.

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“It’s really quite alarming. I can’t hide anywhere. I am retired now. Nowhere in my condo can I get away from the noise,” said Carnarvon Street resident Debbie L’Abbee. “I don’t know what the decibel level is, but it just makes you feel very anxious. It’s this pounding. It’s the bang, bang. It’s like torture.”

While she understands noise is inevitable from construction sites, L’Abbee hopes Bosa Development will do what it can to “significantly” reduce the noise.

Having lived through pile driving at the RiverSky construction site in 2016, Columbia Street resident Ann Phelps wrote to city hall before work began at Pier West and asked that the impacts of pile driving be a condition of the city’s approval of the project. Since pile driving started on the site about two weeks ago, she said the noise has been unbearable.

“I work from home generally, but not anymore,” she said. “There’s no way you can work from home.”

In a Jan. 8 community update to neighbours, Bosa Development stated it is aware that noise is a concern to residents and businesses in the area and is working to minimize disruption as much as possible.

“Bosa Development apologizes to its neighbours for the noise caused by impact hammering at 660 Quayside, and we are working to minimize it as much as possible, including doubling construction crews and changing our schedule to complete the work as quickly as possible,” Dan Diebolt, Bosa Development’s vice-president of development, said in a Jan. 22 statement to the Record. “We also thank the community for its patience during the construction of a residential project that has technical and safety demands rarely undertaken in Metro Vancouver, namely, building a shoring wall under water that will separate the site from the river.”

After testing a variety of equipment to determine the best and safest way to accomplish the job, Diebolt said Bosa determined the primary method will be vibratory hammers, which don’t generate significant noise, but impact hammers will be required at times. Bosa said impact hammering, and other activity that generates excessive noise, won’t be done outside of regular working hours.

In addition to increasing the size of its workforce as a way of completing the work as soon as possible, Bosa is seeking the city’s permission for extended work hours on the site (7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday to Saturday), but that request has yet to be considered by the city.

According to Bosa, impact hammering will happen about twice a week for now, and only for a limited time. It expects the impact hammering work to be complete by the end of March.

“We are a couple hundred of metres away – it’s a 110 decibels at our front window. That’s at 8 o’clock at night,” Phelps said. “There is people with little children that can’t do their homework. There is nurses and police officers and cocktail waiters that are up really late at night that can’t sleep past 7 a.m. Because there’s no way you can sleep in that. No way. I just think they knew this was going to happen and they should have told the community. I personally would have sold last year if I had known this was going to happen.”

Emilie Adin, director of development services, said the city has received a variety of complaints about the project, including the level of noise (from pile driving and other construction activities), vibrations from pile driving, light intrusion from the construction site and hours that work has been taking place at the site. She said the city investigated complaints that construction was occurring outside of permitted hours (not for pile driving) and has issued Bosa with three fines totalling $1,000.

“I have been surprised to hear how challenging the site conditions have been. I have been empathetic of all parties, including the affected residents. We certainly are hopeful to find a way forward that meets the residents’ needs,” she told the Record. “We haven’t given up hope but we are finding it technically difficult to resolve.”

In response to complaints about noise and vibrations from pile driving on downtown development sites, the city approved changes last year that included restricting the use of diesel-impact hammer pile driving equipment over 30,000 foot pounds and reducing the hours that pile driving is allowed on Saturdays (to between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.)

“The building bylaw amendments that relate to the type of technology that can be used, those come into effect on March 1, but Bosa did voluntarily make commitments to use other pile driving techniques themselves, even outside of the bylaw requirements process,” Adin said. “My understanding is they have not been able to meet those requirements because of the site challenges and site conditions that they encountered on the site. We are in consultation with them. Our engineering team and other staff are exploring all options with them to make good on the commitments they have made to the community, but they were voluntary commitments.”

Adin said some residents believe other cities are making pile driving requirements a condition of issuance of development permits, but the city doesn’t have the authority to do that. She said there may be a possibility of addressing pile driving concerns as a condition of future rezoning applications, but that wouldn’t apply to this project.

“The rezoning was already in place for Pier West, so we couldn’t retroactively make it a condition of rezoning,” she said about changes approved by the city last year. “We don’t have the authority to make it a condition of a development permit. Our exhaustive research did not find that they (municipalities) were making those a condition of development permits. There are things we could do which is what we have done, which is the amendments to the construction noise bylaw and the building bylaw. Those are put in place, it’s just that there’s a lag before they take effect.”

Staff will be providing council with a report on the issue at its Feb. 4 meeting.

A staff report presented to council in 2018 stated that areas requiring piled foundations for heavy building and structures include the downtown, Queensborough, Brunette Creek and Sapperton neighbourhoods. The report notes that a large number of developments are scheduled to occur over the next 10 years and many involve “significant construction activities” in densely populated areas.

Given the development coming to the city in future years, is pile driving noise something residents will just have to get used to?

“We have already undertaken those changes that will take effect on March 1 that will minimize impact on neighbours,” Adin said. “I also would like to add this is a particularly challenging site. Because it is located alongside the water, the noise echoes. Not all sites would require the same degree of piling and not all piling noise would spread as widely as this site’s. I would not say it’s something that people have to get used to – I think this is a really extraordinary situation.”