What are you looking at here?

This is contaminated waste entering the watershed that supplies and supports the drinking water of more than 50% of Bowen Island households, and which also supports a diverse and fragile ecosystem.

These are photos I took in late November 2021 of contaminated waste flowing from Riley’s Cidery into what was then our pond.  That pond is directly fed by Murray Creek as it leaves the property of Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie, the owners and operators of Riley’s Cidery.

The waste was an oily, reflective, discrete substance, coating the water and breaking up into smaller fragments and flowing on. It was discoloured, which doesn’t show up well in the photos, and it clearly flowed from the Riley’s Cidery property where the creek leaves that property and enters what was ours, curling rightwards into the pond with the current of the stream, before breaking up and flowing on out of our pond into the creek as it continued.

Not only was this an entirely avoidable and preventable event, but it was also one for which there is absolutely no excuse.

And, what is even worse, there is absolutely, still now, nothing in place to prevent it happening over and over and over again. And, even even worse, a failure, an abandonment, of any effort to prevent this not just at this one site, but at multiple sites and into the future, with no safeguards in place.

How did this happen and why I am so confident in stating that it was avoidable and preventable?

How did this happen?

To explore the question of how this happened, I will, over time and in multiple posts, address and evidence the actions of, variously,

• Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie
• Ross Beaty
• The Bowen Island Municipal Council and staff
• The Islands Trust
• Vancouver Coastal Health
• BC’s provincial government
• Community groups and elites who enabled and participated in this sorry mess

Why do I know this was avoidable and preventable?

Before November 2021, before Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie were issued a Temporary Use Permit in March of 2021 to operate a new cidery, we (my mother and I) asked Rob and Christine, asked the municipality, asked Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), about precisely this risk and what protections were in place. We communicated those same concerns and worries in our submission to Council for consideration when they considered the TUP proposal on March 22. We followed up and asked questions of our municipality, Vancouver Coastal Health, the Islands Trust, after the TUP was issued. We let VCH know that the flow of water through the creek was starting and stopping in weird and random ways, we asked the municipal bylaw officers to follow up when work was being done on the site of the cidery, we asked for clarification of the watershed zone, the Development Permit Area, and so on. We communicated with the BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources, about water usage, about the pollution, about water licencing and conservation.

When this pollution happened, in November 2021, we had been lied to, dismissed, ignored, and treated with contempt by all those parties. Repeatedly. And that carried on.

There were – are – laws in place, rules, the experiential knowledge of many of those involved, the evidence of what was going on, that should have prevented this. But they failed. Repeatedly. Still are.

Still, now, as evidenced in the TUP renewal application that went before Bowen Council in December 2023 for Riley’s Cidery, it carries on.

Again, over time and in multiple posts, I will set out and evidence the steps we took and tried to take and the responses we met, before and after the occasion of these photos.