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COVERAGE WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 2 2015
LOCAL NEWS – LOCAL MATTERS
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Fire razes homeless camp Jennifer Moreau
jmoreau@burnabynow.com
A fire at a homeless camp in the woods next to the corner of Gaglardi Way and Lougheed Highway early Friday morning highlights some of the dangers of sleeping outdoors in Burnaby, which does not have a year-round homeless shelter. “What can you Related: do,” assistant fire chief Erik Vogel Coleman says ball’s in said. “The crews respond, … (they city’s court tell) the guys where See pg. 3 the shelters are and this is where you can go – maybe they don’t know. But if they don’t go, we can’t do anything.” It’s impossible to say how many Burnaby fires are connected to homelessness, because the fire department doesn’t keep track. For example, Friday morning’s fire was described a bush fire, with no mention of homeless people. The NOW inspected the burn site and found multiple items, including bedding, children’s toys, empty alcoABANDONED A makeshift camp where homeless people were living was destroyed in a fire on Friday morning. Reporter Cayley Dobie, above left, walks through hol bottles and suitcases, burnt Continued on page 9
part of the camp. PHOTO JENNIFER MOREAU
Report: Boot to blame for creek mess Jeremy Deutsch
jdeutsch@burnabynow.com
It turns out that a wayward boot is behind the series of construction mishaps that caused the Stoney Creek culvert failure last month. During the rehabilitation of a culvert on a Stoney Creek tributary, an A.C. Paving employee who was maintaining a filter screen on a pump at the construction site got his boot sucked into the inlet hose of the pump. The boot incident led to a cascading set of events that eventually forced a large
amount of sediment into the creek and put the fish habitat in the waterway at risk. The details of the mishap are part of a staff report presented to Burnaby city council that provides a post mortem of the entire project. The city report explained in absence of the bypass after the boot got stuck, the upstream drainage flows overtopped the cofferdam and water flowed through the construction area sending debris to the No. 2 bypass pump discharge hoses at the Ash Grove inlet.This caused the bypass pumps and storm sewer plug at the No. 2 bypass
pump to be compromised.The report noted at this point, the construction area was taking on full drainage flows and caused the newly placed slope to fail with a rush of water which transported the sediment from the site downstream. It was several hours after when construction crews re-established control of the upstream flows and the slope erosion. The city had undertaken the project in the first place after crews and Stoney Creek streamkeeper members noticed the beginning of some creek bank erosion near the outlet of the Stoney Creek Tributary 3A
culvert under Gaglardi Way in the fall of 2014. By spring 2015, the city said monitoring showed increase erosion to the bank.The decision was made to complete the rehabilitation before the winter. In August, A.C. Paving was awarded the contract for the project, with work starting in September. City staff had originally suggested heavy rains prior to the original incident on Oct. 30 were the cause of the failure and subsequent sediment damage. Continued on page9
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