FEBRUARY 2010

February 2010 was a historic month for the city of Vancouver. Now that it’s over, we can look back fondly on the events of the Winter Olympic Games and their effect on our city. Hosting the Olympics was a once in a lifetime experience and one that presented a number of challenges. The road closures, security restrictions and tight timelines were all hurdles to overcome. The lead up time to the Games found Denbigh busy as we worked around the clock on several projects in Vancouver and Whistler.

As part of a repatriation project from the Canadian Museum of Civilization, we transported a historic carved cedar canoe from Vancouver to the new Squamish Lil’Wat Cultural Centre in Whistler. This was a heart warming event and as you can see from the pictures below the canoe received quite a welcome home.



Denbigh was also involved in handling the artwork for a number of provincial and international pavilions in Vancouver. These included the BC Pavilion, Canada House, Italy House and the Ontario Pavilion.

Another interesting project was transporting a 12 foot tall Patrick Amiot sculpture prominently displayed at Molson Canadian Hockey House to its new home once the Games concluded.

This piece required a well coordinated team effort. Like most Canadian hockey players, this fellow was tough to move.

In July 2009 Science World, the iconic dome at the end of False Creek, was rented by Russian Olympic organizers to be converted into Russia House, a cultural centre promoting the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. Denbigh was hired by Science World to handle the contents of their recently installed Search Gallery. If you haven’t been to Science World, this is a natural sciences gallery full of fragile animal taxidermy, mineral specimens and a full size Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton (!)



Denbigh packed all of these items on site in the gallery and transported them safely to our storage facility. Once the Games were over, we returned all of the pieces to the gallery and reinstalled them safe and sound. Both of these projects had to be done very quickly to enable the gallery to first be turned into an athletes’ lounge and then returned back to its original form. We had never moved a T-Rex before, but careful planning and handling brought the project off successfully. Maybe you could say we won a “gold in skeleton”!

It was an exciting time to be in Vancouver and participate in the many projects that took place in the city. We are proud to have done our part in helping to host a successful Winter Olympics.