Kinder Morgan is in discussions with the City of Burnaby to plant hundreds of trees to replace the dozen or so cut down during pipeline survey work on Burnaby Mountain last fall.
The original plan was Kinder Morgan would remediate the area last spring, but the city didn’t like the proposal put forward, according to Dipak Dattani, the city’s deputy director of engineering.
“It was not what we accepted for our parks. The plant species, the plant density was not acceptable,” Dattani said, without elaborating.
According to Dattani, a contractor hired by Kinder Morgan will handle the site restoration sometime in November, but no exact dates have been set.
The number of trees cut down is unclear as the city claims it was 13, while Kinder Morgan’s count showed seven.
“Right now they are proposing to plant 300 trees, which are in three gallon pots,” Dattani said. “That’s what we would accept.”
Dattani didn’t have any details on what kind of trees they will be, and he declined to share his thoughts on the matter.
“It’s their submission that we’ve accepted, nothing more than that,” he said. “We had asked for the remediation work to be done, and they are doing that.”
Last fall, Kinder Morgan’s survey work caused enormous controversy, as the city, which opposes to the pipeline expansion, forbids cutting down trees in a local park. Kinder Morgan then went to the National Energy Board, which overruled the city’s bylaw to let the company complete the work, which involved drilling holes into the mountain. Whether the NEB has the power to override city bylaws is something Burnaby is now contesting through the courts.
Kinder Morgan spokesperson Ali Hounsell explained that the company is committed to remediating the damage from the survey work and the associated protests.
“We committed in the beginning to do reclamation on all of the damage that was done to the park at the time,” she said. “We’ve been going back and forth on the plan making sure everyone’s happy with that.”
