LangleyAdvance
Ready for the BC Senior Games? pg A14
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Tuesday, September 2, 2014
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All together now A new and imposing church campus is under construction on Old Yale Road at 235th Street by the Aldergrove Seventh-day Adventist Church. See more on page A5. Tina Cooke photo
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Environment
Owner must test neighbours’ lands Aug. 30 was the deadline for soil testing required near a former drug lab.
Drug investigators hauled equipment and raw chemicals out of a Willoughby site in April. The residents downstream want to know what was dumped on the property, and if it spread to their land.
by Matthew Claxton mclaxton@langleyadvance.com
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With a deadline at the end of August for soil sampling, residents in a Langley neighbourhood say they haven’t heard anything about whether or not their land is toxic. “We haven’t heard from anybody, period,” said Diana Sampson. With her husband Tom and neighbour Trevor Lassam, they have been talking to Langley Township, Fraser Health, and the provincial Ministry of the Environment for months, trying to find out what was in their soil and groundwater. Residents on 207 Street south of 72nd Avenue were surprised in April to learn that a major ecstasy lab had been busted at a rental property just up the hill. But the bust explained what had been happening to their ditches over the past several years – brown water had been running downstream, and leaving a foul smell in the air. Plants were either dying off near the property, or further down, were growing like crazy in the ditches. The police found that chemical
Matthew Claxton Langley Advance
waste was simply flushed out a pipe at the back of the garage used by the drug makers. In August, after months of trying to get any government agency to tell them what was going on and when their land would be tested and cleaned, several neighbours went public with their concerns. [“What’s flowing into my yard?” Aug. 21, Langley Advance.] According to the B.C. Ministry of Environment, the owner of the land, which was a rental property when used as a drug lab, is responsible for any cleanup. The owners are required to turn over a Site Risk Classification Report by Aug. 30. “The source site owner will have to do more sampling to determine the extent of contamination,” said a statement from the provincial environment ministry.
A spokesperson for the ministry said the owners of the property were notified of their obligations in May. An initial assessment was due within 30 days, and was completed. The case was then referred to the Land Remediation Section of the ministry. On July 30, the ministry informed the landowners that they needed to submit the Site Risk Classification Report. “The Land Remediation Section will continue to be involved in the ongoing site investigation and/or remediation work to be completed at the site until a risk classification can be confirmed or the site is determined to be non-high risk,” said a ministry statement. The report was due Saturday,
yet Sampson said she and her neighbours still haven’t been approached about sampling or testing. “We can’t rule out the potential that it [toxic contamination] could migrate off the source property but it’s too early to tell. The source site owner will have to do more sampling to determine the extent of contamination,” said the ministry’s statement. For the residents living near the site, there’s no question that the toxins left the property. “It’s obviously migrated,” said Sampson. “What they need to do, and what they should have done right away, is take a sample of the sludge coming out of that pipe.” The water pipe leading away from the drug lab and emptying into the nearby ditch has brown iron staining from what the residents are sure is residue from the lab. Despite the ministry’s contention that the landowner is responsible for cleanup, the neighbours say they still don’t even know exactly who owns the property. Some cleanup work has clearly been done on the former drug site itself, with dirt hauled away and white tarps laid down over a sizeable area. The ministry did not answer questions about what penalties might be laid if suitable testing was not done by the deadline.