Weyerhaeuser also neglected to inform the Auditor General of BC about the massive fertilization inside the Nanaimo drinking watershed. He examined the area as one of 8 case studies in his 1998-99 report "Protecting Drinking-Water Sources." References to drinking-water pollution from fertilizer use are otherwise peppered throughout the report.
A recent news-flurry in Nanaimo newspapers has resulted in a barrage of phone calls from concerned citizens, so the GNWD has commissioned a research scientist, Dr. Robert Lockhart to do a study on the problem for $4500. Thats right, Dr. Lockhart will make a report for $4500, and the GNWD will make important drinking-water management descisions based on this report.
Dr. Lockhart works for BC Research Inc. which is involved with tree plantation biotechnology, or "agro-forestry" which also involves massive use of chemicals as growth promoters and retardants of trees and other plants in forestry operations. The enclosed letter is where I'm at with this so far.
Sincerely, Ingmar
[ EDITOR: We now have the Provincial Government requesting thoughts from the public about amendments to the Water Act. Although many of us are of the opinion this request is merely "window dressing", if we don't participate, they will go ahead and do what they want without us even having the ability to go back on them publicly in regard any future plans for amendments. Below are comments again from Ingmar as well as the web page address;]
Well, if the Gordon Campbell government was serious about protecting water, they could start by protecting designated community drinking-watersheds from the incessant scourge of logging. Take a Google Earth flight over the Nanaimo drinking watershed for example and see the horrific legacy of private-land logging. The entire 350 sq.km. drinking watershed has been stripped of not only every stick of its once-magnificent primaeval forest cover, but so too have the second forests been stripped off.
The Jump Lake reservoir, from where the residents of Nanaimo obtain their drinking water has the highest concentration of logging roads in the province. After heavy rains, massive turbidity plumes can be seen running into the lake. The entire watershed was utterly destroyed by the giant American logging corporation, Weyerhaeuser, which after buying out Mac/Blo, immediately proceeded to clearcut 4 separate 100 hectare tracts of old-growth which had been set aside for the benefit of Blacktail deer.
The entire watershed is owned as ‘private land’ with virtually zero oversight nor even the slightest environmental protections. Weyerhaeuser, unbeknownst to the Greater Nanaimo Water District spread more than 60 tons of chemical fertilizers into the area around Jump Lake before it was proven that the Agrium product they were using was derived from US industrial waste containing dioxins.
If the Campbell government is serious about protecting the water supply, it should immediately confiscate all privately held community drinking water supply areas, and designate all such areas, public and private, as off-limits to any sort of logging. We need the very highest standards of protection for these lands which must be set aside solely for the production of pure drinking water, -in perpetuity.
Politically, such action would be easily accomplished. However, such action will naturally be resisted from the giant corporations to which the Campbell government is so beholden.
