Our History
The first two dredges dropped their buckets into the muddy waters of Roberts Bank on July 2, 1968
to begin work on a bold mega project for Canada. Their mission was to create a 20 hectare (50 acre) man-made island
for use as a multi-cargo superport.
The reclamation project for the National Harbours Board (the predecessor to the Vancouver Port Corporation
and Vancouver Port Authority) had followed a 1966 draft Master Plan from engineering consultants Swan
Wooster for a superport some five kilometres into the Strait of Georgia and connected by a reclaimed causeway.
The first customer was Kaiser Coal, (later Kaiser Resources Ltd., B.C. Coal and Westar Mining), which had
developed a new coal mine at Sparwood in southeastern B.C. and entered a partnership agreement with
Japanese Steel Mills to operate a deep-sea dry bulk terminal at Roberts Bank.
Westshore Terminals, as it was known, was officially opened by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and B.C.
Premier W.A.C. Bennett on June 15, 1970. The first ship to sail from Westshore was the Snow White which left for
Japan on May 4, 1970 with 24,289 tonnes of metallurgical coal.
In the early years, Westshore had a throughput capacity of 5.5 million tonnes.
There were two main coal products and it took 43 employees to run the terminal.
Shipments totalled 1.5 million tonnes in 1970 with 33 vessels calling. Throughput more than doubled in
the first full year of 1971 to 3.8 million tonnes and by 1979 had reached 10.1 million tonnes thanks to more coal
mines coming on stream. Bigger equipment such as two stacker-reclaimers helped lift the terminal’s capacity
The pressure of increasing shipments helped persuade the National Harbours Board to approve an
imaginative plan to quadruple the size of the Roberts Bank facility to 80 hectares. Work began in 1981 and took until
early 1984. Westshore leased half of the reclaimed land (40 hectares or 100 acres), built a second deep-sea berth,
and added a twin rotary dumper station to go with the original single rotary dumper,
and high-speed conveyors and other handling equipment.
Shipments jumped dramatically from 11.7 million tonnes in 1983 to 16.5 mt in 1984 and have climbed
steadily since to break 20 mt for the first time in 1989. Westshore set a record in 1997 at 23.5 million tonnes.
Since then the company has consistently shipped an annual total of around 21 million tonnes.
Today, Westshore has 195 employees and runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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