Dumping grounds
Kensington group daunted by decades-old garbage heap discovered in New Annan area
NEW ANNAN, P.E.I. - When Johanna Kelly first stepped out onto the trash heap, her feet sank down into the huge pile.
“This is everything you ever threw away in your life,” she thought, as she hastily made plans to come back another day.
When she and the rest of the Kensington North Watersheds Association did return, they found everything from a 38-year-old Zellers bag to perfume bottles, beer cans, entire bikes, clothes, shoes, medicine vials and even condom wrappers.
“Oh, yeah, I found lots of those,” said Zachary Phillips, one of the group’s core team.
The watershed organization works to improve water quality and habitat for fish and wildlife. Often that means days spent in chest waders snipping alders in the streams. And like today, it sometimes means picking through garbage.
“This is really sad,” said Kelly. In a late November drizzle, the midden heap revealed a garden of glossy holiday ribbon and coloured glass shards.
David Cody, an administrator with the group, holds up an old bicycle wheel.
“It’s a solid rubber tire,” he said. The heavy wheel dated back to the first half of the 20th century.
“It's like an archaeological dig,” said Kelly. She estimates the pile is more than 50 years old.
“What’s that you’re standing on, Zach? A jacket?”
It was. But pulling up the old coat just uncovered more trash.
“What I found weird, there was literally trees trying to grow there, right on top of the trash,” said Phillips.
The heap fills a narrow strip of riverbank between the Confederation Trail and the Barbara Weit River in New Annan, just east of Summerside. “The Barbara Weit River has its really lovely sections, some very lovely forested sections, and its highly challenged sections,” said Kelly.
The section near the garbage heap is part of a three-year restoration project.
Rosie MacFarlane, a freshwater fish biologist with the provincial Fish and Wildlife department, said trash heaps like this one used to be normal.
“Fifty years ago, it was common practice for people to haul their garbage to the back part of their property and, quite often, at the back of their property there was a stream. So, it’s not really unusual to find these big, old dump sites around the Island,” she said.
MacFarlane said while it’s never a good thing to have garbage next to the stream, a lot of the items are probably not toxic to fish, but it doesn’t mean the old dumps are harmless.
“There might be some chemicals or old petroleum-based products buried within there that could be harmful to aquatic life. It’s the unknowns that are an issue.”
The watershed group made a small dent in the pile in early November, but Kelly estimates it will take another three truckloads to clear away enough garbage to let the riverbank recover and stop the waste from falling into the river.
“We pull it out of the stream then you go back and there’s more stuff in the stream,” said Kelly.
She’s not sure if new garbage is falling into the water or if their restoration work is causing the current to uncover items buried in the sediment.
Neither possibility is helping the fish, though.
“From the fish point of view, they need the cool clean water and clean gravelly bottoms, so anything that would compromise the habitat quality will have a negative impact on the fish,” said MacFarlane.