PEI Green Party critical of pesticide use after thousands of fish killed
CHARLOTTETOWN (CP) - As environmental officials in Prince Edward Island continued collecting thousands of dead fish from two rivers thought to be contaminated with pesticides, the provincial government said there was little it could do to prevent what happened.
Environment Minister George Webster said despite regulations that call for creation of grassy berms and 10-metre, pesticide-free buffer zones along P.E.I.’s rivers, an unusually heavy rainfall Friday probably overwhelmed those barriers, flushing high levels of farm chemicals into the Tryon and Dunk rivers over the weekend.
July 25th, 2007 at 8:52 am
I suppose that if it’s killing all the fish, one might wonder what the pesticides are doing to us.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
well, it’s happened at the same time as we’d had a fairly major oil pipeline rupture and spill in Burnaby, BC, where it has leaked into the ocean…check out the leading story on CBC.
All I have to say is…unfortunate as it is, these incidents are probably the only major impulse to breathe life into the campaigns of local Greens, respectively.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
That’s a really good point. The PEI Greens did well talking about pesticides on farmland and did extremely well for a rookie party. Question is, is there an effective means of removing pesticides from soils?
July 25th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Or better yet, do these disasters represent a failure of politics?
July 26th, 2007 at 10:30 am
I’d say these disasters illustrate and are a consequence of a disconnect in the regulatory system.
The Burnaby incident had a contractor working from the maps given to them by the gas pipeline company. Contractor claims they didn’t get the right map, with the precise location of the pipeline and thus broke the pipe.
It’s also a due diligence problem - something I deal with as an aspect of my work. Watch the contractor and the gas company initially blame each other, but eventually they will both recognize there had been no sufficent due diligence exercised.
The home and plot owners and the city will be sueing their ass off, the government will have to step in and work out a formula to pay out money to those people affected by the spill….it’s going to be a nightmare.
Politics is a context for this, particularly in the sense that environmental stewardship gets promoted every day - but not necessarily exercised. However, on the ground level the problems are the kind of problems not easily solved by any politician. You can’t insure against human error, just like a national park can’t warn climbers sufficiently against every possible danger, say an avalanche. It’s not always possible.
August 16th, 2007 at 7:45 am
It’s time to stop WONDERING what it is doing to us, and wake up and SEE what it is doing to us. It is KILLING us too, just not as quickly as the fish. Plain and simple.