A longtime North Burnaby resident wants to know why the city decided to tear up blackberry bushes in Confederation Park in the middle of berry season.
Retired longshoreman Ken Erickson, who’s lived in the area since 1983, said grabbing a handful of berries during his walks along the blackberry-flanked paths north of the park’s tennis courts is something he looks forward to this time of year.
“I just have a snack on the way,” he told the NOW. “I’ve see other people come there with containers and fill them up and take them home.”
When he went to the park last week, however, the bushes were gone.
“They’re torn right out,” Erickson said. “Every little bit of them is ripped out of there. It’s right down to the ground.”
He said there might be a good reason the city had to wipe out the bushes, but officials should have put up a sign to explain the move – especially at this time of year.
“My biggest objection is they should have waited a month until the berries were gone and after everybody had had their snacks for August, then that would have been the time to tear them out,” he said.
Unfortunately, however, the best time for berries is also the densest time for brush, according to the city, and that’s a safety and security risk in parks.
“We are very sensitive to the blackberry issue, we really are,” Steve Bruneau, superintendent of parks operations, told the NOW. “We leave them up everywhere, but there are certain areas, for safety-security, we need to cut them down.”
One of those spots is the section of Confederation Park, close to the Beta Avenue parking lot, where the blackberry bushes were destroyed last week.
“We get a lot of theft,” Bruneau said. “We get a lot of needles. What we cleaned out of this area here, for example, in this go around, they got a kitchen sink, skis; they got steel, burnt copper wire; you got tires, blankets, bikes, clothing, car seats. They find all kinds of stuff in there.”
Dense brush close to the parking lot provides potential cover for thieves, he said.
“People sit in the bush and they watch you leave,” he said. “You’ve got your picnic chairs and your blanket and your cooler, and you head down for a picnic in the park. As soon as you’re about 30, 40 seconds away, they know you’re not coming back, and, boom boom boom, they break the glass and take your stuff.”
The city aims to clear dense brush in high-risk areas every year, Bruneau said, but crews didn't get into Confederation Park until mid-September last year.
"This year we decided to get an earlier jump on it," he said.
An earlier version of this story stated the city hadn't removed brush from Confederation Park for two years. After checking work records, Bruneau ammended that statement.
