The “Sand for Shirley”, the campaign will see thousands of signed postcards gathered from the public, along with a spoonful of sand for each card. Hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of sand are being dredged from the Fraser River to “pre-load” the many boggy and unstable sections of the proposed SFPR route. The sand piles have been displacing residents, farms, Burns Bog, and turning neighbourhoods into dustbowls in the summer wind. Paving of the road, for which there is no contract in place, would not be set to begin until the pre-load has sat for approximately 2-5 years.
Let Transportation Minister Shirley Bond know you don’t like the Provincial
Government’s Gateway Program. Send some preload sand to Shirley and tell
her what you would rather see the government spend our tax money on.
Better Transit Not Freeways! Schools Not Freeways!
A ffordable Housing Not Freeways! Farms Not Freeways!
I full heartedly support your efforts, however, even as a conservationists I am not convinced by your website. Please explain the situation more, map out the plans for the impact area. Burns Bog Conservation area is special but surrounding Burns bog is a horrible looking industrial area and a garbage pit if I remember correctly. For sure I would rather see a green up in this area than a highway, but if a highway is going to go somewhere I have less of a problem if it runs through an industrial area. Also your website doesn’t offer reference or comments from other people to help support your argument. Furthermore, the comments people posted on the petition make it obvious that they have no idea what will happen because of the highway going through burns bog area they are simply against highways in general and leave general comments about saving nature. This shows a weakness in your petition. I need to understand better what the specific impacts will be before I sign my name to a petition.
Here are some facts for you to ponder, Meghan. Thanks for wanting to learn more about it.
• 241 acres of farmland through Delta will be paved over.
• 36 acres of Burns Bog forest will be logged—the Bog is supposed to be federally protected.
• The SFPR is likely in violation of the Species at Risk Act and will permanently damage habitat for three threatened species: the Red-Backed Vole, Pacific Water Shrew and the Sandhill Crane.
• Two 9,000 year old aboriginal archaelogical sites (St. Mungo’s and Glenrose) will be crushed under preload and four lanes of pavement, these sites are older than Stonehenge.
• It will cross over 100 streams and creeks through Delta and Surrey.
• It runs through an important feeding and breeding area along the Pacific Flyway, which is the path of the migratory birds—over 1,000,000 birds stop here on their migration.
• It will span seven ravines along the edge of the Fraser River in North Delta, meanwhile our once mighty Fraser River is collapsing.
• The wetland at the edge of Surrey Bend Park will be compromised.
• 225 properties in Delta alone will be demolished, 33 are heritage resources—Surrey would not give us their numbers.
• The freeway will be within 1 km of seven schools in Delta alone, significantly raising the risk of childhood asthma.
• There are significant allegations of Government corruption surrounding both the flipping of land (insider information) and the Tsawwassen First Nation Treaty (bribery), I can supply more information on this if needed.
Thanks for your interest, Meghan.
The highway goes along the northern edge of the bog, the lagg zone, and many concerns were raised by the Scientific Advisory Panel appointed by government. For more on the Burns Bog impacts, many reports are gathered on the Burns Bog Society website at:
http://www.burnsbog.org/resources/perimeter.shtml
Specifically, the Scientific Advisory Panel’s report is here:
http://www.burnsbog.org/PDF/SAP_opinion_SFPR.pdf
The garbage dump – the Vancouver Landfill – is on the south edge of the bog.
This website was meant to be a home for the Sand for Shirley campaign, with all the evidence for our opposition collected over the past five years available on the links to the right. We’ll work at making the supporting evidence more quickly available for readers.
As far as comments from other people to support our arguments, how about Gordon Campbell, Jane Jacobs and David Suzuki?
http://badfreeway.wordpress.com/quotes/
Love it.
It is not just about Delta and Burns Bog either. In Surrey as in parts of Delta besides industrial areas, residential neighborhoods are being impacted and farmland. Surrey Bend is another unique eco-system that will be impacted if this project goes through as proposed. Going through neighbourhoods and is some cases within 100′ of a school there are health concerns. Going through farmlands there are food security issues. Going through the bog and Surrey Bend as well as along the South Fraser Foreshore there are many environmental issues such as endangered species, salmon habitat, toxic run off into the river. There are also climate change impacts in terms of increased green house gas emissions. It is just impossible to list all of the details of all of these impacts on a single website or petition.
There are also climate justice and social justice issues related to spending money on a freeway that is essentially the evolution of a decades old idea, but is less and less relevant in terms of current social and urban planning goals.
I am one of the people who signed the petition and in the course of trying to get a more reasonable apporach to the transportation issues have learned a about many different reasons why there are better ways to deal with the concerns. If you start getting involved, doing some research, I think you would quickly find there is a lot of great material supporting alternatives to the freeway. For me the main one is common sense. You don’t solve traffic problems with freeways. Alex Fraser Bridge is a case in point.