Evidence mounts linking your dirty tap water to CLEARCUT LOGGING!
Logging road under construction at Harmony Creek, Coquitlam watershed, spring 1990.
Since 1961, the Greater Vancouver Regional District has conducted a program of clearcut logging and roadbuilding in the Capilano, Seymour and Coquitlam watersheds, the water supply areas for Greater Vancouver.
Never-before-logged wilderness forests, including some of the finest stands of ancient western red cedar, western hemlock, balsam and Douglas-fir left in the lower mainland, are being systematically clearcut and replaced with second-growth tree plantations; all under the guise of "good watershed management." Every year about 130 hectares of 300-year-old (or older) rainforest comes crashing to the ground in Greater Vancouver's drinking water supply areas. That's an area one third the size of Stanley Park, equivalent to 2,700 city lots. To bring the chainsaws and their operators into these stands - a privilege denied the general public - several kilometres of 15-foot-wide logging roads are blasted out of the steep, unstable mountainsides of the Capilano, Seymour and Coquitlam watersheds every year. Numerous scientific studies show that this constitutes extremely unwise and foolhardy watershed management.
Your voice is needed now to request a full, independent public inquiry into the management of the Greater Vancouver water supply areas.
According to a 1972 UBC forestry Ph.D. thesis by Dr. Colin O'Loughlin, soil erosion in the Seymour and Capilano watersheds is being increased in logged areas by at least 74 percent over natural erosion levels in unlogged areas. O'Loughlin stated that, "large landslides were more frequent on clearfelled areas than on undisturbed slopes. Road construction, which was responsible for 14 large landslides and more than 100 smaller failures, appeared to be more detrimental to the stability of the Coast Range slopes than other activities carried out by man."
Click on image for detail.
In a Dec. 3, 1990 article in the Vancouver Sun, chief engineer John Morse of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) is quoted as saying that "the GVRD has incorporated much of O'Loughlin's work in its logging plan." Why is it then, that as recently as the spring of 1990, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee was able to photograph a brand new logging road being gouged out of an excessively steep mountainside in the Coquitlam watershed? The extreme steepness and heavy rain resulted in a mudslide, originating right at the road, that had traveled directly down into Harmony Creek which flows into the Coquitlam reservoir. The point at which the mud and debris entered Harmony Creek is only 1.5 kilometres from the reservoir. When tons of mud enter a roaring, flood-swollen stream this close to the reservoir, there remains no doubt about the direct relationship between the logging road construction and siltation of the drinking water reservoir!
