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Park maintenance fails to take green method

Editor: Last week, at the 12th Avenue entry to Boundary Bay Regional Park, a Metro Vancouver employee was busy chewing up the blackberry cane with a noisy gas-fuelled tool.

Editor:

Last week, at the 12th Avenue entry to Boundary Bay Regional Park, a Metro Vancouver employee was busy chewing up the blackberry cane with a noisy gas-fuelled tool.

OK, this is a nature park and a wildlife preserve, but the cane's an invasive species that has to be controlled. Hand tools would be quiet, clean and green, but who needs quiet, green practices in a park?

We carried on. Then, in spite of the open windows of the homes along the shore, the worker raised a cloud of dust.

Why? She fired up her powerful blower to go after a few bits of cane that had landed on the path.

But her blower couldn't raise them, so she cranked up her blower, which caused the dust cloud to grow, but those stubborn bits of cane continued to resist her blower.

You get the picture. What are we to conclude? When working in a nature reserve, emitting exhaust, raising dust and making noise is much more important than using good sense - a rake, in this case.

Then, today, while returning home through Winskill Park, a Delta employee was weed-whacking the grass along the treed walk between the Kinsmen apartments and the Tsawwassen Medical Clinic with no regard for the trees' bark: Nick, slice, hack.

Those trees have sur-vived Delta's neglect, but I doubt they'll survive Delta parks staff.

And then two big, strapping guys arrived to clean up after her with their powerful, noisy, smoky blowers. Gas fumes, noise, and pointless blowing of cuttings here and there and everywhere for the breeze to blow about.

Costly, noisy, dirty nonsense. And what about the danger those machines pose?

Delta knows they're dangerous because its workers wear eye protection and heavy overalls; Delta knows, too, they're noisy because its workers wear ear protection.

But a pox on the peace and safety of taxpayers.

Delta and Metro Vancouver might just as well dump trucks of tax dollars about for public workers to nick, slice, hack and blow to the four winds.

Nothing is absurd if taxpayers are paying.

Greg J. Edwards