Minutes of the Rotary Club of Burlington Central - January 5, 2017.
President Michael Molloy presiding.
We welcomed guests Chris Chanda and his son Ethan, also Eli Nader and Alex Evans. Our exchange student Viktor was with us too.
Mike Molloy played for us an uplifting video from Rotary International. A couple of take-home messages from this were that not only is the end of polio possible but also plausible. We were left with: "there is no limit to what we can do in Rotary”. Michael thanked us for what we do in our club.
Bernie Scrivener said grace and asked for divine intervention for our hockey team to win gold.
Rob Sybersma was very grateful to be helped to complete the Four Way Test.
Viktor told us of his eventful week, his visit to Québec city with Peter Skoretz and family. They went skiing and snowboarding in Mont St Anne. Viktor noted the slight difference between Mont St Anne and the Alps but found it nonetheless challenging. Temperature was down to -15°C for their New Year's Eve party in Québec city. Viktor has also tried curling something not found in Poland. He enjoyed visiting Ripley’s in Toronto with Sheila Welham.
René Papin confirmed the availability of tickets for the pre beer Festival dinner, a five course meal with beer pairings on the evening of 26 January. Tickets will cost $100 of which $40 goes to Rotary. There will also be a tax deductible portion. The dinner will feature a number of beers from local craft brewers. As Mike Molloy put it, "if 80% of the members of the club sold two tickets each, it would be a sell-out"
District Training, PETS one and two will be occurring in February
Work is underway for the 2018 Convention which district 7080 will be hosting among others. There will be consideration of home hosting and opportunities for members to take part as ambassadors.
On Saturday night of 7 January there will be a special game involving among others, Johnny Bauer and the proceeds of the game will be going to Rotary. It will take place at the Hershey Centre.
The Sgt at Arms was welcomed loudly and cheerfully though the mood changed once he started fining. The fact of Owen McElhinney being on Facebook in a kilt cost him a fine. Peter Thoem was fined for laughing at the sergeant, not at his jokes. Andrew Gaydon was fined for something. Bob Martin was fined for not being at the Christmas party where Rod had intended to point him out to Rod’s wife, clearly Bob’s fault and it cost him…no I didn’t get that either. Peter Skoretz got away with only a small fine for freezing the sergeant out on the street during a particularly cold snap last week when he allegedly didn’t notice Rod standing there; I believe him, thousands wouldn’t.
Kathie Thomas announced that she will be away until April. She will have an active time going on a cruise with Eric Anderson and their spouses followed by a trip to New Zealand to see her sister and return via Florida.
Ron Lambert has a family tradition of seeing movies over the New Year and strongly recommended La La Land.
Michael Torsney was presented with his Paul Harris +1 award, a long-standing and much loved and valued member of the club. He will be having surgery next week. Michael's wife fell recently and she is recovering from this. Your thoughts and support for Michael and his wife are appreciated.
Eric Anderson introduced our speaker for today, his son-in-law Chris Chanda and his grandson Ethan Chanda who accompanied his father to manage the slide presentation. Chris Chanda is a multi-Emmy award winner originally from Delhi, Ontario from a fifth generation farming family. He attended University of Guelph where he started in geology but ended up in marketing and with a Bachelor of Commerce. There he met Patti and had four children. Initially he started work is working for Wescam in marketing. Wescam produced a stabilised camera for military purposes and this became invaluable for news, sports and documentary making. It became the first aerial camera and was famous for filming the 1994 police chase of O.J. Simpson. In 2002 L3 acquired Wescam and Chris went out on his own and his company has had a 20 year history of filming with 8 nominations for Emmys and two wins. He has documented six Olympics, winter and summer, including Sydney, Beijing, Rio. He has filmed 14 Hawaii Ironman Championships, 12 Xterra Off Road Triathlons, Five Iditarod Trail (before climate change caused the snow to disappear), 70 Indie races, 30 PGA profiles, and several spring seal hunts off the coast of Newfoundland. He has also filmed for Survivor, for The Apprentice, and numerous NASCAR races. He's been to the Arctic, to the Antarctic, to the Amazon and even to Everest. He has filmed for the MTV, the Grey Cup, and the recent BMO Maple Leafs Classic.
Chris spends up to 180 days away from home and showed a picture of the inside of a helicopter which he calls his “office”, clearly his comfortable place. He typically works with a pilot but sometimes there are additional folks including producers, quite an adventure for a small town boy.
The seal hunt is an annual event, highly controversial since the 70s and always followed by Animal Welfare and Humane Society and animal rights activists. In the past there was a lot of ice that they could put down on at times and even walk among the seals. Over the last few years and the undeniable climate change, cracks in the ice started to appear and the ice field is now just floating pans of ice that are very much more difficult to set down on. In recent years it's become difficult to find helicopters locally because of the considerable local ill will. He's had to rent helicopters from New York. He's been made very unwelcome by locals and even asked to leave and has had to have some police intervention at times.
When in China, all helicopter and filming activity has been supervised by no less than a general from the army. The problem is that the control mechanisms are similar to that used in missile technology so it is highly protected, an executive order from the White House is required even to allow it into an unfriendly nation and obtaining such clearance is tricky. No Chinese person was allowed to touch the equipment and the only solution was to de-rig the system every day and to take it into the hotel! This filming always attract a lot of media attention. In China all this was controlled by the military.
The big challenge was that the pollution was so bad that for two weeks prior to the Olympic Games, 75% of flying time was cancelled due to visual flight regulations. Another unpleasant aspect is that the camera equipment is so large that the side door of the helicopter has to be removed allowing for little protection for the occupants.
He was employed by South Korea who were setting up a base in Antarctica among other nations all rushing to do the same thing. He’d already been involved with a Planet Earth series, tracking polar bears, investigating the lives of indigenous people in the Amazon, and deforestation. To get to Antarctica took seven days at sea before landfall. They were in a large icebreaker capable of penetrating 1 m thick ice, carrying two helicopters; one of the helicopters was a multipurpose twin rotor heavy lifter for establishing the base. There were numerous technical difficulties given the adverse weather conditions. The wind is typically very strong up to 70 mph quite regularly, a very inhospitable environment.
In 2011 he was in Christchurch and was driving to the airport when a 6.3 earthquake struck. He described this as if the car had been in a accident without there being any other vehicle involved so great was the shakeup. The ground was liquefied by the strength of the quake causing water to come up from beneath. For hours afterwards there were after-shocks which sounded like an approaching train. The airport had to be closed. Roads were folded up like rumpled carpet. Because he was there with camera equipment he was in a position to document the aftermath of the quake during which 181 people were killed and 2000 injured among much destruction.
Chris is involved in televising car races with a company called Helivision. The main reason for people watching these races, it would seem, is to see the crashes! The helicopter had two cameras, 1 to look at the following pack of cars and the other to get "tight" views of crash sites. There has also been helicopter use for chase scenes in a TV series.
Recently the camera has been mounted on motortrikes, snowmobiles, fixed wing aircraft and trucks. Snowmobiles were used to film ski races. Events such as the Queen's plate also televised in this way.
Ron Lambert asked whether the increasing use of drones was a threat to his industry. Chris believes that because of the lack or regulatory controls on drones they will become more of a problem rather than less as they get bigger and carry more. The use of a drone requires visual contact throughout and for example, real estate agents cannot video the back of a house from the front because of this. They need to be 9 miles away from an airport, away from all flight paths, and cannot be used over occupied areas. He believes that it's only a matter of time before something quite serious happens during poorly regulated use of these devices and regulation will become even more stringent further curtailing their use.
Chris was thanked by Michael Torsney and the meeting adjourned.
