www.exploresaturna.com is an online community development platform designed to promote heritage tourism on Saturna Island in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Using dynamic web content, short documentaries, 3D content created with the Unity game engine and interactive maps, the website connects visitors with the fascinating heritage of Saturna Island and its vibrant modern community, focusing primarily on the Spanish exploration of the BC Gulf Islands and the community's rehabilitation of the picturesque East Point Fog Alarm Building.

The website is meant as a template, and could be expanded to any community in BC or around the world, especially to communities experiencing economic difficulties. A community's heritage and its stories are what make it truly unique, and by telling those stories over the Internet, a community can build a sustainable tourist industry that supports local businesses, give the community a sense of pride and continue helping them to thrive.

The fog alarm building, the most photographed building in all of the Gulf Islands, now a multi-use community-operated centre, almost became a pile of wood and nails in the back of a garbage truck. The story of how the Fog Alarm Building was saved and rehabilitated by the community, speaks not just to how Saturna Islanders tackled this particular project, but to how they tackle so many projects on their island, as a cohesive, well-knit community that consistently takes on tasks much larger communities would struggle with, with examples ranging from their innovative recycling system, to the Saturna Ecological Education Centre (SEEC) and, of course, the Fog Alarm Building.

Living in a lighthouse, usually in a remote, often cold and certainly wet locations, is not for everyone. But before the automation of the lights up and down Canada's coastline, the longest national coastline in the world, the role of lighthouse keeper was incredibly important to commerce and remote communities.

The lighthouse on Saturna's East Point was especially important because of Boiling Reef, a rocky shoal that juts out from East Point towards Patos Island. More than one ship has been lost on it, like a coal barge that ran aground sometime in the early 1900s. The ship broke apart, spilling it's valuable black rocks all over the reef. Word has it that the following winter was uncharacteristically warm on Saturna Island.

As any sailor worth his salt at the end of the 19th century could have told you, a lighthouse wasn't much use if all the light around you was obscured by the thick banks of fog that often blanket the treacherous channels of the Gulf Islands. It was a Canadian invention, the diaphone fog alarm that helped keep mariners off the rocks as they sailed and steamed around the George Straight.

Each diaphone had its own unique rhythm so that ship captains could identify where they were on their charts. The two sounds, a "blast" followed by a "grunt", where created using similar technology to that used in organs, by forcing compressed air through specially shaped pipes out the small end of a resonator or horn. Initially running on steam, fog horns later ran on diesel and electric motors, providing an invaluable, life-saving service to mariners all over the world.