The Watch
LATITUDE
IT’S OLD, IT’S NEW, IT’S OPEN FOR BUSINESS— HERITAGE HOTEL RECOVERS FROM FIRE TO REVEAL ITS MANY CHAPTERS In the wee hours of Dec. 29, 2016, a fire broke out on the roof of Banff’s Mount Royal Hotel, a heritage building downtown. The hotel evacuated its 297 guests, and
firefighters fought the blaze for 10 hours. Investigators discovered the cause was accidental—a propane torch ignited construction material, which smouldered unnoticed and eventually spread. So, what next? With a section of the roof and 12 guest rooms destroyed, as well as extensive water damage to other parts of the hotel, the path forward was a major rebuild, renovation, and modernization, costing $45 million. Over the next year and a half, APEGA permit holder PCL Construction worked frantically to restore the building. And on Canada Day this summer, the 109-year-old hotel reopened.
Although the historic exterior and facade remain, the hotel has been reborn in the modern luxury category, thanks to a redesign by Alberta architect Gerry Doering. The hotel boasts patio space and hot tubs on its roofs, which complement the contemporary feel of 133 guestrooms. But Mount Royal Hotel continues to acknowledge—and even, to some degree, live in—its past. On the main floor, a new museum tells its story. It’s an interesting one, in part because the recent renovation is not its first. The project has been “a long process of uncovering the different iterations, the different
designs since the building was first constructed in 1908,” Global News quoted an owner representative saying. “We’ve taken different inspiration from those different developments and those different eras, and we’ve embedded them into this new experience,” continued Mark Henrickse, VP of marketing for Banff Jasper Collection by Pursuit “Guests are going to have these really interesting throwback experiences to some of these different design elements, going back to the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s and the ’60s in an interesting and unique way.”
CANADIAN NATURAL RESOURCES LTD. TO BOOST HORIZON OIL SANDS OUTPUT A ginger recovery continues in oil and gas, character- ized by at least one recent commitment by an Alberta company. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. announced, along with its second-quarter results, that it plans to spend another $170 million this year on projects that could boost production at Horizon by 100,000 barrels
per day. The funds will advance engineering and pay for equipment for projects in 2019 and 2020. Right now, Horizon, located near Fort McMurray, can produce 250,000 barrels per day of synthetic crude, a product that’s close to West Texas intermediate in the prices it fetches.
FALL 2018 PEG | 29
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