It’s a call that Coquitlam Mountie Taylor Schmidt won’t forget.
On Tuesday, July 16, the constable and another officer assigned to the Coquitlam RCMP Rural Unit were tasked to investigate a suspicious structure along the Pitt River.
Someone had seen two people in a boat stop along the shoreline to install a solar panel in the brush — in an area that can only be reached by boat.
At 10 a.m., the rural unit travelled to the site and found the solar panel but, because the water was shallow, police couldn’t dock the vessel on the shore.
Instead, Const. Schmidt kept his life jacket on and slipped off his boots to walk across.
The structure?
It turned out to be for a white sturgeon habitat project that needed solar power for a nearby transponder. The work involves tagging and monitoring the fish to look at their migration behaviour and habitat.
“This is a call that I am going to remember for the rest of my career,” Schmidt said in a news release issued today, July 18.
“I never expected that I would be [wading] through muddy water barefoot to investigate a file. But it was the most effective and safest way to determine what the structure was and ensure there is no criminality.”
Coquitlam RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Alexa Hodgins stressed that “no call is too small” for the public to report suspicious activity or a crime; the detachment serves Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Anmore, Belcarra and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) First Nation.
Coquitlam RCMP can be reached by calling the non-emergency hotline at 604-945-1550, reporting online, visiting the Guildford Way detachment or a community police station or, for emergencies, calling 911.
