By Lauritz Chambers The 6.4 hectare site, across the road from Powell River’s beautiful Willingdon Beach Park, was given to the municipality in 1966 for park purposes. But four years later it became a garbage incineration and dump site for everything considered too toxic and expensive to ship out of town.
Hundreds of dirty little secrets lie buried there. Some 40,000 tonnes of bottom ash from the old incinerator, roughly 10 tonnes per day for 16 years was simply dumped. Also 150 cubic meters of asbestos piping, 800 tonnes of roofing, 1800 tonnes of gyproc and 100 cubic meters of tires and mountains of glass lie in piles over the landscape.
Powell River is an isolated community and it is very expensive to ship this stuff away. The shortsighted view of that day was to find a nice central location where dumping it was cheap and easy and then leave the clean up to future generations.
Looking down on the site from above one wonders what all the fuss is about. Alders seem to be growing quite abundantly. Huge forests of blackberries cover the mounds. The old dilapidated incinerator lies abandoned, slowly disappearing into the encroaching forest. People pass by the site daily without a moment’s thought. Reality, however, paints a more fearful picture. Heavy metals including lead, zinc, copper and barium lie concentrated in the soils and accumulate in the tissues of those plants. When animals eat those blackberries they ingest the metals which in turn accumulate in livers, fat and brains. Those poisons concentrate and move up the food web as larger animals eat the smaller ones.
Who’s responsible for the mess? Who made the decision to place a garbage incinerator in a park beside two salmon bearing streams and to dump bottom ash and everything else there?
No jobs were lost or politicians thrown out of office for doing so. We may not have chosen that method of dealing with our municipal waste, but it’s now our responsibility to it clean up. We’ve been told by the provincial government that we must render the site safe for humans and wildlife, and ensure the groundwater isn’t contaminated. The process won’t be cheap.
Enter the Powell River Botanical Garden Society. Our idea is to turn this disaster into a beautiful and safe garden. Not just an ordinary garden, but one where plants, bacteria and fungi work the soil in a process called ecoremediation. Managers with the BC ministry of environment prefer this local ecological approach over “dig and dump.” The University of Victoria has also given strong support, seeing the possibility of involving their students in important research.
We think establishing a botanical garden at the old incineration site makes a lot of sense. It presents an opportunity to clean up the site, beautify our town in a very interesting way and lessen the inevitable cost of remediation. But we need help to accomplish the task. We need friends able and willing to donate muscle, time, energy and help to raise funds. We thank you for your support in what ever form it may take.
Lauritz Chambers is a director of the Powell River Botanic Garden Society.
