Stench from Fisher Road facility intolerable
As a resident that lives close to Fisher Road Recycling, I am fed up with the stench that this dump generates. We in Cobble Hill have been dealing with this issue since it was first started by the previous owners. It was the great idea put forward by the area director at that time to have this facility put on an industrial zoned site that is surrounded by residential zones. This was to be a state of the art facility that used a Herhoff system. It turned out to be an incomplete system and should have been closed immediately. If not for exuberance of the director and the CVRD, we would not be still having this problem all these years later.
The CVRD is aware of the putrid odours that this place constantly spews out into the neighbourhood but say they cannot do anything about it. Supposedly, it is up to some ministry to enforce the odour problem. We are to fill out an on-line form and submit this to the CVRD who then forwards these on. What a waste of time that is. We used to be able to phone it in and hope that someone would get out of their chair and come out and smell this for themselves. They never did, to the best of knowledge, otherwise something would have been done about it. I would prefer to bottle the stench and bring it to the CVRD building and open the bottle so that everyone there could smell it like we do almost every day.
We had a town hall meeting about the new owner’s intentions. Water and odour were the two main concerns but composting sewage sludge was also brought up. We were assured that everything would be fine and no sludge would be composted and that no odours would be emitted due to their superior set up. They outright lied to us.
When they had an application to expand, the director at the time refused to have a town hall where citizens could voice their opinion. Instead, each individual could submit a letter to the ministry. Obviously this did not have any effect and they were allowed and now we have to deal with the consequences. They were also able to expand their hours of operation and now one can add the annoyingly loud noises that come from trucks being loaded and unloaded from very early in the morning. Adding lack of sleep to the stench makes one very irritable and are helpless to do anything about it. FRR is the worst neighbour and I encourage everyone to stop using this facility, including the CVRD because they are paying them to have one of the old white bins there for free drop offs of household recycling.
Other sites have been closed due to a myriad of complaints but not ours. What is it going to take to have this place shut down?
Ed Aiken
Cobble Hill