CHERRYVILLE – After a short lived blockade prevented construction from starting, BC Timber Sales is now publicly announcing it intends to go ahead with a controversial forestry road near Cherryville.
Plans for the road and eventual logging in the area have stirred up safety concerns among residents who live down stream.
“This fall we plan on going ahead with the first 1.6 kilometers of the road and next summer the remainder will be constructed,” says Colin Johnston, a woodlands manager with BC Timber Sales.
“We were quite upset they were going to go ahead without giving us an opportunity for our assessment that we’d asked for,” says electoral area ‘E’ director Eugene Foisy.
Foisy is asking BC Timber Sales to give opponents more time to have further study done before road construction begins.
“It is a very narrow scope, the assessment they did, and we feel there has to be a lot more than that done,” says Foisy.
“We don’t see the need to wait,” say Johnston.
BC Timber Sales says they are proceeding slowly on the project and will incorporate into their plans anything new that Cherryville residents bring forward.
Cherryville residents fear the logging project could impact the community.
They say there is a history of slides in the area and worry the road construction or the logging will cause more landslides.
“The assessments completed by the geotechnical engineer and the hydrologist have said that there is a very low risk of that. That’s the information that we need to move forward and so we have to trust the professionals that we employ,” says Johnston.
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