Planners
at the Greater Vancouver regional district now recognize that our current
system of management stormwater is a bigger threat than pollution to salmon
in small streams, As a result of this philosophical change, developers may
soon be asked to alter time-tested methods of building new communities.
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When Eleanor and William Ward moved on
to their Coquitlam hobby farm in 1966, nobody gave much thought to
the connection between the small waterways on their property and the
health of salmon in the Strait of Canada. As far as the Wards could
tell, salmon did not use the seasonal brooks that threaded through
their land. The water collected in small pools and disappeared into
the ground so quickly that it wasn't even enough to sustain 10 cows
they grazed on their farms. Out in the strait, salmon were thriving,
but that was the 1960s -- the last great hurrah for sport and commercial
fisheries in B.C. The human population'sappetite for land in the settled
areas of the strait was on a collision course with the habitat the
fish needed to reproduce. Coho, the bread and butter fish of a lucrative
sport fishery in the strait, were hardest hit. On the east and west
flanks of the strait, hundreds of small salmon-bearingstreams were
shunted into popes, ditches and storm drains -- or buried and forgotten
underneath industrial parks, suburbs and garbage dumps. Much of this
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work was undertaken by municipal governments
in the name of stormwater management -- control the drainage path
of rain, and you protect human life and property by minimizing the
risks of floods. In the last five years, however, there is growing
recognition that our system of stormwater management visits more long-term
harm upon streams than anything short of obliteration. Little ponds
like those on the Wards' property may not contain fish, but they contribute
to the natural drainage that sustains salmon in other waterways. While
streams and ponds in northeast Coquitlam still survive, allowing salmon
to flourish, that could soon change. In late July, Coquitlam city
council approved a development plan that will put 25,000 people --
eight times the present population -- into the northeast in a futuristic,
self-contained community. But without a dramatic revision of the way
we design our communities, say the experts, the salmon of northeast
Coquitlam will be the next to go. But without a dramatic revision
of the way we design our communities say the experts, the salmon of
northeast Coquitlam will be the next to go. |
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