Huge clearcut burns need to be re-thought
I just read your editorial on backyard burning. I agree that this archaic, anti-social, polluting practice has to stop.
My neighbours, who are a young couple with little kids, burn every chance they get, winter, spring, summer and autumn. Sometimes I can’t see to the back of my property because of the smoke. However, I think it’s worth mentioning that the transfer station at Bing’s Creek takes garden waste as well as branches under two inches in diameter for free, but for larger branches as well as lumber, plywood, and other scrap wood products, you have to pay, and it’s stupidly expensive given that the wood they are paid to take is then sold to an outfit in Washington State, where it is burned to make electricity — or so the sign on the bin at Bing’s Creek would have us believe. If wood disposal was free at the transfer station, perhaps more people would desist with backyard burning.
But my concern today is the clearcut that happened over the last month or so on the west side of the highway just north of the bridges over the Chemainus River, between the Red Rooster/Russell’s Farm Market and the Fuller Lake Arena. Huge piles of brush have been stacked up all over that decimated piece of land, and it looks like it’s about to be set on fire.
Why can’t the people who razed that lovely piece of land haul it all away to be composted, or have a couple of chipper trucks come in and make something usable from it, because I bet you anything it’s going to go up in clouds of smoke.
I think the municipality should have a word with the people responsible for that clearcut about those huge piles of brush before they add insult to injury by setting it on fire. PDQ.
T.E. Taylor
Duncan