Tearing Down the Killing Wall

Tearing Down the Killing Wall

In winter 2025, a barge carrying a crane moved slowly into the Courtenay River estuary to remove the last remains of the old sawmill. For weeks, 20-metre-long rusty steel pilings were wrenched from the mud one by one, marking the end of a 400-metre retaining wall that had kept the land apart from the water for 70 years. The barrier is emblematic of a common coastal engineering practice known as “hard armouring,” where rigid, permanent structures…