Duhamel residents plan action over logging in watershed
By Nelson Daily Staff
By Suzy Hamilton, The Nelson Daily
Duhamel Creek residents met to take action last Thursday night against logging set to begin in late fall in the lower Duhamel Creek area on Nelson’s North Shore.
Nearly 100 Duhamel Creek residents met at the North Shore Hall to plan how they are going to stop Kalesnikoff Lumber from removing 600 truckloads of wood from what they believe are unstable slopes.
At issue for the residents are the steep canyons and sandy soils which they believe could cause slides or a debris torrent into Duhamel Creek, damaging properties and possibly lives below.
“I’ve worked a lot of years, I’ve built my soil. I don’t want to see it ending up in the west arm of Kootenay Lake,” resident and logging road builder Glen Jones told the meeting.
He was one of four panelists, including RDCK Area F director Ron Mickel who presented information and fielded questions from the audience.
Underscored by the slide tragedy at Johnsons Landing, and the slides in Laird and Schroeder Creeks, the residents are worried that Duhamel Creek could be the site of the next slide as weather extremes cause unpredictable flooding in the future.
But Kalesnikoff’s road building supervisor Rob Giesler said in an interview Friday the company has taken extra care in hiring hydrology and terrain stability professionals, who determined the road and proposed cutblocks pose no risk to the Duhamel residents below.
“We’re doing our best to see that they are not compromised,” Giesler said. He said the company has met numerous times with the public and forest service over the last three years.
“The size of the cutblocks is not the issue. The issue is can we manage those forests over time. We’re going to be in there for years and years, maybe even generations.
“There’s a misconception from the public that we’re going to go in there no matter what, and it’s simply not true,” added Giesler.
But Jones, and logging contractor Lee Rushton are not convinced that the 4 km logging road and cutblocks pose no threat. “I’ve been logging all my life, “ said Rushton, “and I’m embarrassed by what I am seeing,” Rushton said at the meeting.
“There are 400 homes in the target area of Duhamel Creek,” he said, recalling the flooding of Duhamel Creek some 50 years ago that took out the neighbourhood of Barnes Road.
“These are small creeks but big steep canyons,” he said, adding that school children are also at risk at the Ecole Sentiers-alpine, formerly the AI Collinson elementary school located adjacent to the creek.
Jones told the audience that, frustrated by the lack of response from the bureaucracy, he filed a complaint about the logging plans with the Forest Practices Board. The board only recently sent him a draft of the report, but based on that draft, the Ministry of Forests issued Kalesnikoff a road-building permit, he said.
The Ministry of Forests did not reply to The Nelson Daily by press time, but a letter from the Ministry presented at the meeting stated that there is no justified reason for withholding the permit and they do not have the authority to withhold it.
A number of strategies were proposed at the meeting, including a blitz on the Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Minister Steve Thompson’s office asking him to stop the road under section 77 of the Forest Practice Act because it will cause an event below that would be catastrophic.
Other measures included hiring an independent geotechnician, seeking legal advice, blocking the road, bringing highways to the table and forming an association.
RDCK director Ron Mickel also said he was investigating the issue to compile the facts and would be pursuing solutions.
