COQUITLAM

COQUITLAM

Is a city and suburb of Vancouver, situated on the northern side of the Fraser River 20 kilometers east of Vancouver and just north of Surrey on the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway #1) via the Port Mann Bridge.

Coquitlam came to be during the 1860s after a road was built from Port Moody to New Westminster as a better access point for the Royal Engineers to transport supplies to the port facilities in Port Moody.  Before its existence, Coquitlam was the center of large sawmill based in Fraser Mills, whom French-Canadian mill workers developed a townsite north of the sawmill, in the community of Milliardville, which became a neighborhood of Coquitlam in 1971 after the two amalgamated. In 1948, much of Coquitlam was damaged in that year’s biggest British Columbia Story; the Great Fraser River Flood, but its population boomed again when the Lougheed Highway (Highway #7) was built in 1953. Warehousing Industries has become the main economic mainstay industry in the city.

Opened in 1979, Coquitlam Center, one of Metro Vancouver’s largest shopping malls features stores such as Zellers, Sears, Sport Chek, HMV, and a GNC just to name a few. The city center of Coquitlam features a city hall, a recreation center, cultural center, stadium, a junior hockey league hockey team (British Columbia Hockey League’s Coquitlam Express) and a post-secondary education institution.

Like the majority of the area that makes up the region of Greater Vancouver, Coquitlam enjoys a maritime temperate climate, enjoying mild temperatures and sufficient precipitation; warm drier summers and wet mild winters are commonplace. However, unlike other cities in the area, precipitation is especially heavy in Coquitlam due to its proximity to the mountain slopes. This all happens when a effect known as orographic causes westward air which originates off the Pacific Ocean to be forced to flow up the Coast Mountains causing it to cool and condense and fall as precipitation. This effect is mainly responsible for the massive 1955 mm (77 in.) annual average precipitation that Coquitlam receives each year, with most falling as rainfall in the fall and winter months, with 287 mm (11.7 in.) in November; the summer is usually sunny with minimal precipitation with 66 mm (2.6 in.) in August. Despite the mild temperatures, Coquitlam can receive trace amounts of snow during the winter months (about an an average of 58 cm of snow each year), however, in most cases the snow does not stay on the ground for more than 24 hours.

In 2002, Coquitlam became linked to Vancouver via the Skytrain Transit System’s (run and owned by the agency of Translink) Millennium Line and there many buses that connect to other communities in Greater Vancouver including that of Burnaby, Vancouver, Maple Ridge, Surrey, New Westminster as well as Port Coquitlam.

Coquitlam is referred by the Salishan First Nations term for “small red salmon” and was incorporated in 1992 as a city.

Coquitlam is the largest of the 3 main communities that make up the Tri-Cities area of Metro Vancouver (Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Port Coquitlam).

Coquitlam's population: 120,512