I’m included on an email thread of local residents documenting what is happening to our precious Stoney Creek, which straddles the Burnaby-Coquitlam border.
What is happening is sewage bubbling up from the sewer and polluting Stoney Creek – an issue that the NOW has reported on before over the years, including this detailed piece on the situation.
You can read it by clicking on the above sentence, but I’m also sharing the latest because it’s just so infuriating that this is happening and governments of various levels don’t seem to be moving fast enough to fix it.
“Yet again today there was a dump into Stoney Creek,” George Kovacic, who shared the above photo. “An email was sent to our authorities to inform them of the dump. We were advised that there was at least one more dump today into Stoney Creek … For the avoidance of any doubt, it is not turbidity. Earlier in the day, Stoney Creek was crystal clear. (We) are questioning why we should bother reporting these dumps? Even though we report these dumps they keep on happening and more often. Plus we waste a lot of time taking photos, making calls and sending emails but absolutely nothing changes. The dumps keep on occurring and we are becoming discouraged. But that doesn’t mean we’ll ignore the problem like the authorities seem to be doing.”
There is some action, but that isn’t much relief to people who love this creek.
“The overflows near Stoney Creek have prompted Metro Vancouver to include expanding the nearby Stoney Creek trunk sewer system as part of its proposed 2022-2026 Capital Plan, with modelling currently underway to identify bottlenecks,” reads our previous story on this. “But it’s not just a Coquitlam or Burnaby problem — such overflows plague weak spots across the Metro system. In 2017, over 39 million cubic metres of untreated sewage entered regional waterbodies in Metro Vancouver. Much of the overflow occurs in the aging municipal pipes of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster, where combined sewers mix sanitary wastewater from toilets and drains with stormwater.”
This is just unacceptable. People in this region pay a lot of money in taxes to various levels of government. Upgrading our infrastructure so we are not literally polluting local water systems needs to be priority.
“Is this not illegal?” asks Kovacic. “Stoney Creek is home to salmon spawning grounds, endangered nooksack dace and other endangered wildlife. Why are our elected officials/politicians not able to solve these dumps and spewing sewage? Why are our civil servants not able to implement solutions that stop the spewing sewage and dumps? What’s wrong? Is it too much to ask that there is no spewing sewage and dumps into Stoney Creek?”
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
