Vancouver businesses begin to tally the damage from vandalism and looting store, about

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Vancouver businesses begin to tally the damage from vandalism and looting


VANCOUVER -- By midday Thursday, throngs of lunch-hour shoppers milled about the London Drugs at Georgia and Granville in downtown Vancouver replacing the mob of looters that had ransacked the store Wednesday night. There was little evidence of the damage caused by the post Stanley Cup rioting.

Company CEO Wynne Powell surmised there wasn’t much more his company could have done to prepare for the event, nor that police could have done to stop a crowd that beat at the store’s reinforced glass and metal shutters for two hours to get in and appeared to loot methodically.

“This was not an impromptu act, that suddenly they were in the store and went crazy,” Powell said in an interview, and he suspects the thieves “took a shopping-list approach” before the riot happened.

However, as business owners in the downtown core began cleaning up the broken glass and assessing their losses to theft, differing opinions are emerging about whether or not the riot could have been foreseen or prevented.

The Downtown Business Improvement Association estimates that some 50 businesses suffered damage of varying degree during the melee, which began just as Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, which saw the Vancouver Canucks lose 4-0 to the Boston Bruins, was ending.

Powell said he believes the part of the crowd that rampaged through stores, hitting the Hudson’s Bay store and then, across the street, London Drugs, was a group of thieves bent on rioting rather than fans disgruntled about the loss.

“I don’t know of any police force across North America that could have responded to that kind of magnitude of riot that happened that quickly,” Powell said.

He added that security staff made the decision to close the store early around 8 p.m., and when crowds started gathering police were able to help get the staff out safely before the looting started, so luckily none were hurt.

Then police “were obviously pressed to stop the theft of items.”

Powell said the store suffered about $350,000 to $500,000 in damage, and its high-definition security cameras observed some 200 people walk out with about the same $350,000 to $500,000 value in merchandise.

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Charles Gauthier, executive director of the Downtown Business Improvement Association, said he was satisfied with the guidance that businesses were getting from the police during the playoffs and there was nothing that happened in the two weeks of fan-zone celebrations leading up to Game 7 that suggested they should do anything differently.

During the playoffs, Gauthier said the association was given advice about making sure they secured any street furniture or items “in the public realm,” and said the city did a good job of clearing out newspaper boxes as well as the glass from bus shelters at vulnerable locations.

“It’s always 20/20 hindsight to say ‘should we have done something differently, should we have had more security,’” Gauthier said. “It’s a great position to be in; unfortunately, criminals don’t advertise they’re going to do this.”

Gauthier said he is also convinced the riot was the product of “a group of individuals hell bent on committing criminal acts,” regardless of whether the Canucks had won or lost.

However, Candice Zerb, owner of the Essensuals London salon in L’Hermitage Hotel at Richards and Robson, believes the city was unprepared for the size of crowds that were gathering.

Zerb said she started closing her shop at 3 p.m. on game nights “because it would get drunk and it would get rowdy” as crowds gathered, which was completely different from the crowds that gathered downtown during the Olympics.

“I’ve never, ever seen a crowd like this before,” she added. “It definitely was not people who live downtown.”

She said when the City of Vancouver set up the fan zones with big screen televisions, she assumed there would be a level of security comparable with the 2010 Olympics.

Zerb’s shop suffered two broken windows in the rampant vandalism, though nothing was stolen. She said police responded the best they could, but “150,000 downtown and you don’t have the same security? What did they expect?”

Most businesses should see their losses covered by insurance, according to Lindsay Olson, the Insurance Bureau of Canada’s vice-president for B.C., Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Olson said many businesses will have coverage for losses due to the interruption of their business as well as for theft and damage caused by vandals, adding that the fact the vandalism happened during a riot doesn’t complicate matters.

“If anything, it might be a little easier for claimants to demonstrate a vandalism event took place, because we know what happened and the rough geographic area it covered,” Olson said.

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Clean up begins, on Thursday morning after the Stanley Cup 2011 riot.



The Chapters store at Robson and Howe the morning after the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, B.C. on June 16, 2011.

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The aftermath of the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, B.C. on June 16, 2011. Here workers clean up broken windows at Chapters at Howe and Robson.