There’s a big difference between how Burnaby residents and FortisBC officials are describing the removal of trees to prepare for a natural gas pipeline expansion along the Burnaby Mountain Urban Trail in the Forest Grove neighbourhood.
One resident calls it a “tree massacre;” Fortis calls it “vegetation removal.”
“We drive by there every day, and we’ve lived in the area for years and years,” longtime resident Fred Lowther said of a stretch of Broadway between Underhill and Arden avenues where a swath of trees has been felled. “All of a sudden you see activity there and, at first, you think they’re just doing some tree trimming. You don’t think they’re going to do a clear cut.”
Resident Zeljka Corak was dismayed at the loss of the trees.
“It’s a walkway; people ride their bikes, walk their kids,” she said. “In the summertime – you know how hot it was last summer – those trees provided beautiful shade.”
The tree cutting has lit up the neighbourhood’s Facebook page with comments from concerned Forest Grove residents, according to Lowther.
“People in the neighbourhood are communicating with each other about this, expressing alarm and sadness,” he said. “People have walked through there and jogged through there for decades and, all of a sudden, all gone.”
Lowther, Corak and other neighbours are also concerned about surviving trees that have been tagged with red markers.
“Of course, we’re concerned that they’re next,” Lowther said.
They’re not wrong.
The Fortis plan calls for a total of about 30 trees to be cut down between Underhill and Arden avenues to prepare for a pipeline expansion, according to media spokesperson Trevor Wales.
The types of trees being lost include black cottonwoods, red alders, big-leaf maples and a few western hemlocks and western red cedars. Most of them won’t replaced, Wales said. Instead, the company will plant native pollinators like salal, fireweed and lupine.
“While FortisBC understands how important trees are to homeowners and communities, a tree near to a natural gas line is a significant risk,” Wales said. “It’s important to note that tree planting is not permitted in proximity to a natural gas line, as trees growing over or near pipelines can interfere with, or impact, routine maintenance surveys, and as a result, these trees are not being replaced.”
Fortis is replacing 20 kilometres of an old 20-inch natural gas pipeline running between Coquitlam and Vancouver with new 30-inch pipe.
Wales said the company consulted with the public before the project began.
“We’ve done a lot of outreach in the neighbourhood leading up to this event,” he said. “We’ve sent letters to homes and businesses in the area as well as going out and door-knocking a lot of the homes that are directly impacted by some of the work that we are doing, and, as part of that notification, we also held a public information session in August and another one in September, which residents were invited to.”
In the information about the project in letters and on its website and signs, however, Fortis does not specify the plan involves cutting down trees, choosing instead the phrases “vegetation removal” and “vegetation clearing.”
Lowther doesn’t remember ever receiving a notice, and Corak said, if she did, it didn’t seem like the work it described was going to be significant.
“We got some kind of little notice, and, honestly, I can’t remember what it was, but it was something, and I didn’t think they would mow them all down, but they did,” she said.
