Burning garbage, dilapidated trailers, metal, human excrement and more refuse of varying origin are what confronts those who tread into a South Okanagan encampment that’s been left to expand “exponentially.”
“It started over the hill and it’s just grown exponentially over the years,” said Brant Cassie, who lives near the Okanagan Falls squatters site and has been watching the encampment balloon in size over the last four years.
“They’ve set up camp here, they’ve set up up the road as the garbage progresses and they just move on.”
He said the once-pristine outdoor space is now simply “ruined.”
“No one could ever camp here and enjoy this spot ever again,” he said.
Human waste can be found in holes dug throughout the area. Those who are staying there have burn pits for some items, while garbage simply piles up in others.
“How does a local go about cleaning this up without going bankrupt,” he said. “I can’t deal with it myself.
“There’s a few of us that want to help but we’re too overwhelmed now. And if we come here and someone comes in and doesn’t like it, then what do we do?”
Getting into an altercation with a camp resident is well beyond the scope of civic responsibility and the prospect is upsetting.
“I’m quite disgusted actually and I’m angry that the system let this happen,” Cassie said.
“It should never be this way. This has been this way for four years now and no one has dealt with it. It just gets worse and worse and worse.”
The camp is full of travel trailers, cars, motorhomes, metal, needles, shotgun shells, drug pipes and tons and tons of miscellaneous garbage that appears to have been stolen.
Cassie thinks many of the squatters who are using the space are also abusing drugs.
“They’ve dug bunkers into the ground here, so that tells a story about the state of their mental capability,” he said.
The mess is a bear attractant, Cassie said, but that’s not the only danger.
Kane Blake, from the Okanagan Forest Task Force said this particular encampment has become a danger with garbage fires being lit.
The presence of these camps has led to multiple fires, one of which BC Wildfire needed to douse.
“This is not the first encampment we have been to where a brush or a wildfire was started. Sadly this is the risk we take by letting these camps stay and something needs to change” Blake said, adding later that the camp cleanup had become on the organization’s priorities for spring.
Cassie is part of the task group as well as a local and he will be joining the effort and is hoping more can help.
“We’re trying to get some volunteers (to) help,” he said. “Anyone who can donate equipment or time to help clean up the garbage in the spring… we want to put it all into bins and take it to the landfill and scrapyards.”
The aim, he said, is simply to get it back as close to its original form as possible — then, he’d like it to not happen again.
“I’d like someone to be responsible that has the authority to tell these guys to move before they set up, but we don’t seem to get the help,” he said, adding that considering it’s Crown land, they should.
The Okanagan Task Force group has cleaned up 815,046 pounds of garbage since September 2016 from the backcountry.
Blake said “we are sadly on track to hit over one million pounds by next summer”.
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