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Carpentry students repair Millennium boardwalk

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On a brisk spring day at the Pembroke Waterfront Park, the sound of drills and generators was music to the ears of Pembroke Mayor Ed Jacyno.

In an effort to begin repaying the city of Pembroke for its donation of land to house the new state-of-the-art waterfront campus, students and instructors from the Algonquin College in the Ottawa Valley’s carpentry apprenticeship program volunteered their time Wednesday to repair the boardwalk, which is often referred to as a crown jewel of the city.

Just before 1 p.m. a delivery of materials arrived in the parking lot adjacent to the 13-year-old boardwalk and the students began the work of inspecting the structure and documenting where the repairs needed to be made.

“This is a living structure and the biggest deck in Ontario,” said Fred Blackstein, Algonquin College governor, chairman of the mayor’s waterfront project and volunteer co-ordinator on the Millennium boardwalk project in 2000.

Jacyno stopped by briefly on Wednesday afternoon to personally thank the students for volunteering their time. Because of the college’s close proximity to the waterfront, he thought it was fitting they would give of their time to do the necessary repairs.

“I’m pleased to see such an enthusiastic group,” the mayor said. “They are not only helping with the repairs, but learning on-the-job skills.”

When the boardwalk was built with natural, untreated Eastern Cedar, Blackstein knew repairs would be needed on an annual basis, but those repairs are usually done in the summer by a couple of volunteers over an extended period. Thanks to the help of the students and instructors all of those repairs could be accomplished in one afternoon, he noted happily.

The boardwalk initially contained 2,000 boards, each one bearing the name of an individual or family that purchased the boards, or in memory of a loved one. Since then, about 700 boards have be added on the approaches to make the boardwalk accessible. Blackstein made it clear that the names would be preserved through the repair process.

This is the second time this week students from the college could be found milling about at the waterfront. On Tuesday night, students conducted a clean up in an initiative that was led by students in the college’s sustainability club.

Tina Peplinskie is a Daily Observer multimedia journalist

Twitter: @TPeplinskieOBS

tina.peplinskie@sunmedia.ca

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