Green Island Lighthouse
There’s a great story about a former lighthouse keeper’s wife on Green Island who used to pin her children to the clothes line so they wouldn’t blow off into the sea. Green Island is a rocky wasteland 25 miles north of Prince Rupert, eight miles from the Alaska border and the most northern lighthouse in BC. No trees grow on this lump of ice in winter, where 50 knot winds constitute a light breeze and last for weeks. Serge Pare has tended the light at Green Island since 1995 sharing his duties with another keeper. “I am hoping that I will still be here until I am 70 years old or too old to live on an isolated place like here,” he wrote to me in an email. Pare starts work at 3:00 a.m. every morning. He tends the main light and gives the first of seven weather reports at 3:30 a.m. throughout the day these weather reports help boaters, sea planes and helicopters. Some years he takes two weeks holidays, some years none at all.
Surplus Heritage Lighthouses
Green Island—one of 27 lighthouses still manned in BC—is not on the list of “surplus” lighthouses released last week by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But nearly a thousand of our lighthouses are now under threat. The government wants to replace them with simpler structures that are cheaper to run and maintain. What it means is that while the Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act was passed two years ago to ensure that historically significant lighthouses would have a shot at preservation, the government wants individuals, municipalities or non-profit groups to seek heritage designation, and turn them into restaurants or museums to pay for the costs of maintenance. Lighthouses are a huge part of our coastal history and 18 of these “surplus” lighthouses are in this province. While most of them are in remote locations, the fate of iconic structures such as Point Atkinson in West Vancouver, Prospect Point in Stanley Park, Discovery Island off Oak Bay and Race Rocks near Victoria—is undetermined. You can find a list of active lighthouses at the Department of Ocean and Fisheries
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3 comments on “Lights out?”
Eve, I really like the picture of Serge Pare on Green Island Lighthouse. I have a book underway–my 19th title–on the lighthouses of BC. I’m emailing to ask permission to to use this image in the book, with proper credit. Is it your image or did Serge emai it to you? If I need to contact him for permission would you kindly provide his email ro send him my email address? The remaining BC lightkeepers are an endangered species! I’m trying to document their stories before they’re all gone. We’ve lost all lightkeepers in the United States. Thanks for running this blog. Best wishes–Elinor DeWire, Seabeck, WA, USA
That woman who tied her children to the clothesline was my Grandmother, Eva Dingwell. My greandfather was AlexDingwell was lighthousekeeper from . The kids tied to the clothesline were my father, Fred Dingwell, and his brother Eric, his sister Doris. The oldest daughter Thelma was sent to school in Victoria.
When my father fell and cut his head on a rock, my grandfather rowed him in a dinghy all the way from Green Island to Port Edwards to be stitched up.
A main source of food there was seagull eggs, until the United Church boat came by with supplies!
That’s a great story! Did you ever get out to the lighthouse?