Re: French Creek is ‘very sick’ (Tuesday, August 2 edition of The NEWS).
A truer title for this article could not be thought up.
We have upper French Creek running through our property, so please, no armchair quarterbacks need respond. If you don’t live on it day in and day out, you don’t see it.
The aquifer is way down and getting worse. Four years ago, an Italian plum and a cherry gave up the fight. I had three established fruit trees die in the last two years and a nine-year-old laburnum died last year.
The creek, well, I spent all last fall chasing fry around and moving them to safer pools, only to have them dry out (and die) as well.
Until the provincial government’s department of highways decided two years back to change the creek downstream past me, the creek here had pools. They straightened, channeled and smoothed the corner in the 2500 block, which changed and sped up the flow and killed our three-foot balsam through erosion, filling the large pool beside it with rock. Very few fry lived last year in our stretch and this year looks as grim.
If people actually thought out the changes they make and stopped clear cutting to the creekside and the logging companies left the mountain alone, things would likely get better.
Three years ago in the creek in front of our place: six spawning pairs of salmon. Two years ago: two pairs. Last year, none. In 1980 you could walk across using them as a bridge.
Rationalize that.
Jamie and Pati NetleyErrington
