I came home from work a few weeks ago to see the strangest thing: my neighbour's house was beached like a sick whale.
One side was floating peacefully in the river, where it should be, while the other side rested on a slope of silt. Ducks waddled on top of the mud where just a couple of hours earlier had been water.
If you haven't guessed it, we live in a floating home - or at least what was designed to be a floating home. With the build up of silt in the secondary channels of the Fraser River, we risk running aground and the potential for damage and injury just like our neighbour. In similar ways, this is true for every floating home and business on the lower Fraser.
Like so many other sunken government services, dredging of the Fraser Road ... er Fraser River used to be funded by Ottawa, but that ceased in 1998.
Making matters worse, Transport Canada at the time installed diversions at critical locations along the river to divert more water into the deep-sea shipping channels. This reduced the reliance on dredging in the main channels but compounded the amount of silt inundating our local channels.
Wisely, on Jan. 30 Delta approved an expenditure of up to $2 million to undertake dredging of the secondary channels around Ladner Harbour; Port Metro Vancouver has also committed $2 million toward a dredging plan. But matching contributions are required from the provincial and federal governments to undertake the estimated $8 million project.
If you are a senior, a student, a single parent, a new Canadian, a government worker, a non-profit organization, a small-or mediumsized business or, simply, someone who breathes air, you know how difficult it is to get senior governments to pay more than status quo for anything that doesn't have a photo-opp attached to it.
With leadership from Mayor Lois Jackson and MLA Vicki Huntington, Delta and the grassroots Ladner Sediment Group have done a supreme job establishing a case for dredging; unlike the lower Fraser, their arguments hold a lot of water.
According to a Jan. 23 report to Delta council from human resources and corporate planning director Sean McGill, failure to address the infill building up in the local channels of the Fraser would result in serious and direct economic losses from the closure of waterfront businesses, float home communities, marinas and the recreational boating sector.
McGill states further - and rather diplomatically, in my view - that revitalization of the Ladner Harbour waterfront would be severely compromised if the harbour were a mudflat at low tide.
I might put it more bluntly: "What a quaint little village, but where did the river go and what's that weird smell? Let's go to Steveston."
The report also lists the environmental impacts from the loss of fish habitat and the increased flood risk due to rising river bottom levels and the diking system's inability to contain the spring freshet.
Unless our senior governments follow Delta's lead, the next photoopp might be a dry riverbed full of tilted homes, beached boats and a sunken local economy.
