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Building on floodplain a disaster in waiting

North Cowichan - North Cowichan's council is turning me into a concerned citizen. It amazes me how often our councillors demonstrate such bad decision making skills.

This time, councillors Koury, Siebring and Woike insist on building the police station on the Somenos marsh floodplain. The current police station, we are told, has to be replaced because it is in the floodplain and it flooded in 2009. Council was informed that just the site preparation costs alone, at the marsh, would exceed the cost of both purchasing and preparing the site at Drinkwater, yet these three councillors insist on wasting taxpayerdollars on the marsh floodplain site. These three are preaching pure rhetorical dogma, and it has no basis in fact.Our politicians are considering placing the proposed hospital on the floodplain as well. Just imagine if an earthquake occurred in our Valley and a tidal surge resulted because of the quake. Our dikes would collapse; the water would flood the plain and render useless our most important facilities in that event - the hospital and the police station. In the civic elections this fall, it is time to replace this type of thinking with some rational decision makers.Don SwiatlowskiNorth Cowichan