2 - Friday, November 20, 1987 - North Shore News

APPEAL HEARINGS

BC
Rail
defends
W. Van

spraying

BC RAIL officials say they
have done everything accor-
ding to the books in their
handling of contentious
plans to kill blackberry
bushes gzrowing along a
10-mile strip of track right-
of-way from Ambleside to
Horseshoe Bay with the
herbicide Roundup.

By MICHAEL BECKER

But, said BC Rail engineering
department environmental coor-
dinator Wayne Maksylewich, ‘If
we’ve had a failure on this, it’s
perhaps that we should have pro-
vided the public with more infor-
mation during our spray applica-
tion process.’’

An Environmental Appeal
Board hearing, scheduled for to-
day and Saturday at the Coach
House Inn in North Vancouver, is
considering the validity of the BC
Rail spraying permit and the
arguments of West Vancouver res-
idents who are trying to block the
spraying.

Said Maksylewich: ‘‘We aren’t
going into this thing trying to
spray hell’s half acre. The provin-
cial Ministry of Environment and
federal Environment Canada came
down and looked at the site.
They're sensitive to public health.
When you do an application you
do it exactly to the permit specs.
Industrial users are regulated more
strongly than people who use
pesticides at home.”’

The right-of-way scheduled for
spraying averages 80 feet — 40 feet
on either side of the track centre
line.

According to the permit, which

covers Sept. 1, 1987 to Oct. 31,
1989, Roundup may be applied
with backpack sprayers between
Sept. 1 and Oct. 3! in each year of
the permit.
' “Berries have always been a
problem and they’ve been par-
ticularly bad this year. The
blackberries have got into the track
section and the rails. They’ve been
manually cut twice this year and
they only come back with a
vengeance. The berries are a con-
cern to both BCR and West Van-
couver District Fire Department.

“If you’ve got a development
alongside the track and a fire oc-
curs, you can’t get a hose through
the bushes let alone a firefighter. A
lot of the areas along the track
have 100 per cent blackberry bush
coverage,”’ said Maksylewich.

Said track technician John
Clarke: ‘‘The ditching is getting so
fouled up there is a danger of
flooding in some areas. The bushes
are also a major habitat for rats.”’

To keep the track running
through West Vancouver clear, the
company ballast sprays the her-
bicide Spike 80 or Krovar to four
feet from the ties every three years.

“It was last sprayed in 1984.
That spraying would happen again
between April ! and the end of
September, 1988,’’ said Clarke.

He said the rail company had to
go through the same permit-ap-
plication process as they did for
Roundup to secure a permit for the
ballast spraying program.

According to Maksylewich, the
decision to hold off on the
Roundup spraying this year was
voluntary on the part of the com-
pany. ‘*We could have gone ahead,
but we decided to get this resolved
through the appeal first,’’ he said.

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