Big changes are coming to Victoria's Upper Harbour
Upper Harbour Cares
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What's changing:
Larger vessels, longer stays
The new graving dock is built to service vessels in the range of 130 - 140 metres. The company expects a large vessel roughly every three weeks, staying one to three months — mostly moored alongside the dock wall.
A purpose-built graving dock
A new concrete dry-dock basin — the company describes it as about 174 metres long — and built for sustained ship-repair work.
Sustained hull work
Servicing large vessels means ongoing sandblasting, grinding, and repainting, with bright work lighting — the routine operations of a modern shipyard, now at greater scale.
More activity in a shared basin
More capability means more vessels and more intensive use of a narrow waterway that is also home to residents, paddlers, and wildlife.
Here's the impact:
NOISE
Sound carries further and louder over open water. Large vessels moored alongside for weeks or months, plus ongoing hull work, mean more sustained noise reaching homes on both shores and the people rowing, paddling, and kayaking the harbour and Gorge.
The company points to the existing noise bylaw and says the dock's structure helps trap sound.
LIGHT
Ship-repair work runs with bright industrial lighting, sometimes overnight. Over dark water it can become the brightest thing on the harbour — reflected and amplified into homes on both shores, and into a corridor where wildlife is active after dark.
We're asking for hooded, angled, or shielded lighting that does the job without flooding the water and homes — a standard, low-cost fix.
AIR QUALITY
Sandblasting and hull work release dust that can carry grit and heavy metals; painting and solvents add fumes and odour — all capable of drifting across the harbour and settling on the water.
There are solutions. That's our whole point.
None of these concerns require stopping the project.
Every one has a known, available fix — used at working waterfronts elsewhere, including the Esquimalt Graving Dock right here in our own harbour:
Enclosed or contained hull work to capture dust, grit, and fumes.
Hooded, angled, or shielded lighting that does the job without flooding the water and homes.
Defined operating hours with real limits on evening and weekend high-impact work.
Enforceable noise standards — measured and accountable, not just bylaw compliance.
The company already says the water and materials used in servicing are contained and treated, and that its environmental commitment won't change with the new dock. We take them at their word.
We're simply asking that commitments like these be written into the approvals — specific, enforceable, and lasting — so they hold for the decades this dock will operate.