A case of illegal dumping into a fragile fish-bearing creek is under investigation.
A Port Moody, B.C., resident posted surveillance video from his backyard showing two men tossing five buckets of what appears to be paint, or another construction material, into Noon’s Creek, which sits on the boundary between Coquitlam and Port Moody.
The resident lives upstream from the Noon’s Creek Fish Hatchery and while the cans were cleared from the creek on Wednesday morning, any material that was dumped in the creek is now making its way downstream.
David Bennie, vice-president of the Port Moody Ecology Society, has also been volunteering at the hatchery for 30 years.
He thinks the substance looks like paint.
“The scary thing is like, when stuff gets dumped into the creek, the creek’s high, fairly high right now, it could come down and destroy everything, because it was done at night by the look of it, and it could come down here today and find everything dead,” Bennie told Global News.
“We just put, I don’t know, 10, 15,000, no, about 25,000 salmon eggs from Chum Salmon in our hatchery. So they could destroy all those.”
Bennie said another pond at the hatchery contains 8,9000 Coho fry, set to be released in May or June next year, and existing Coho coming into the hatchery on the salmon run could have been at risk.
“The trouble is, a lot of stuff like that, it happens, it ends up in the creek, it goes out of the creek and the time you find out about it, it’s already out to the ocean and you can’t even figure out what it was or even where it came from,” Bennie added.
“It happens in the summertime, people dump stuff down storm drains. And it sits in the storm drains for maybe a month because it hasn’t rained. And the first rain, you get all this toxic stuff, but you haven’t got a clue where it came from.”
Bennie said that luckily, the illegal dumping happened within the City of Coquitlam and they have already started to investigate and clean up.
Coquitlam RCMP said it is aware of the incident and officers are investigating.
“I hope they charge them big time,” Bennie said.
“If they’re from a company… just take the business licence away.”
There are many places where anyone can recycle paint at no cost.
“Ignorance. Careless, don’t care about anything but themselves, selfish people,” Bennie said.