Stoney Creek contaminations are getting worse, residents say

It’s been about a year-and-a-half since contaminations of Stoney Creek started making the news, and while there have been some measures put in place, local residents say the issue is worse than ever.

And with municipal elections coming up this weekend, residents have a couple of specific requests for the new council. Those include making the city’s live readings of the creek publicly accessible and treating streamkeepers and residents as equals.

“There’s been a whole series of dumps this month,” said Suzana Kovacic, whose house backs onto Stoney Creek.

“A restaurant dumped used oil into the culvert [last week], so all that ended up in the creek—that was a mess. … There’s been weeks of some reddish-brown water. Turns out it’s got a lot of iron in it.”

Suzana has, along with husband George and son Luka, taken on a role of advocacy and monitoring of the creek alongside the Stoney Creek Environment Committee in recent years.

A sudden ‘gush of red water’

She described recently standing by the clear-water creek at the Rathburn culvert, which is just west of North Road, when “all of a sudden, a gush of red water” flooded the creek.

“That went on for I don’t know how long, and then it would stop. And then a little while later, other people would say [there was] another gush of red water,” she said.

“And this kept turning on and off.”

The issue started in mid-September, and the City of Coquitlam responded to Suzana and George last Thursday to let them know that the issue was caused by a new development with a manure-based fertilizer over-sprinkling their grass with water, which then flowed into the storm drain.

“It took three full weeks to find the problem, and that’s unacceptable,” George said.

And Suzana noted that there appeared to be at least two places doing this, as the contamination had come, at times, from the Rathburn culvert and, at other times, from a culvert in Coquitlam.

And throughout the time of the red water in the creek, Suzana said paint was dumped into the creek twice and drywall mud was dumped once.

“Other times, I’ve seen these long strips of very sturdy paper,” she said.

“There have been piles of blue disposable gloves washing out of the culvert into the creek. Lots. All sorts of stuff. This is just in September. … I’m shocked at how bad it’s been.”

The sewage continues

And all the while, sewage has continued to contaminate the creek, George said.

“This is a health, safety, and environment problem. It’s a health problem and a safety problem because there are streamkeepers going into the creek, and there’s actually kids that frequent that creek as well,” he said.

“Kids throw rocks at the creek, look at fish, and when the fish return, spawn, they’re right by them and getting splashed, and that’s a problem.”

Suzana, who has a PhD in chemistry and works as a research assistant at SFU, has tested the stream over the summer and found high levels of E. coli.

Similarly, Metro Vancouver documents the Kovacic family obtained through freedom of information requests have documented total coliform counts in the thousands per 100mL. That includes a count of 8,600 coliforms per 100mL in September 2020.

In the last year, the City of Burnaby has begun requiring developers to run construction site effluence through a FlowLink water quality monitoring system before dumping anything into storm drains, but most of the contaminations are coming from Coquitlam.

Coquitlam and Burnaby have both begun installing FlowLink systems in local waterways to monitor contamination.

George said Burnaby city correspondences indicated that those FlowLink monitors detected a change in the substances detected in Stoney Creek on Sept. 15, three days before anyone actually saw the red water flowing down.

“But nobody did anything until all the residents started emailing and calling,” he said.

Accessing Stoney Creek data

George said he can file freedom-of-information requests for FlowLink records, but that will often take upwards of a month—or several months.

He said he wants cities to publish the data regularly so residents can compare it with what they see in the creeks. And he hopes it would cause officials to act sooner when a contamination is detected.

“They will not show the data, the live data; we’ve asked countless times,” George said.

He posited two things the city could do: “actually treating us residents and streamkeepers as equals, stakeholders, and being transparent and honest and providing live-time data from FlowLink.”

The latter would also be helpful for anyone in the community who may want to go down to the creek and, for instance, participate in a fish count to know whether the water is safe.

As for their family, George and Suzana said they’re still considering whether they’ll let Luka participate in this year’s fish count.

“It is very frustrating because he keeps telling me it’s fine,” George said. “But I’m like, I don’t know if it’s fine anymore, right? What if he gets something, right? I don’t know. And we’ve lost trust in the system.”

Get Burnaby Beacon in your inbox.

An in-depth understanding of the stories that affect Burnaby and beyond, every weekday.