An encampment along Nanaimo’s Millstone River that had been occupied by people experiencing homelessness is being cleaned up this week.
Nanaimo RCMP said the camp will be cleaned up over the next three days and that measures are being taken to prevent people experiencing homelessness from camping there.
The camp is along Terminal Avenue, a highway-right-of-way, and police said the B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure and City of Nanaimo bylaw and community safety officers are also involved, with Nanaimo RCMP there to keep the peace.
Karen Kuwica, president of the Newcastle Community Association, said the city has worked collaboratively with residents in planning the cleanup.
“We applaud the work they’re undertaking, the way they’re approaching it and how thoroughly they’re planning to do the cleanup…” she said. “To have 40 people live there for over six months, you can imagine the amount of damage.”
Dry and dusty soft soil, leaves and trash on makeshift trails cut into the steep bluff where the camp is located on make cleanup work difficult and hazardous. Police say a barge will be utilized on the river side of the camp, and one lane on Terminal will be closed intermittently.
The camp is the site of two shootings this year, including a high-profile incident in which an auto shop owner was shot after entering the camp trying to recover items that had allegedly been stolen from his business.
Dave LaBerge, the City of Nanaimo’s director of bylaw services, said because the camp’s location is in a riparian zone next to the Millstone River, along a busy road and across from a city park, the city has cleaned out the site each year since 2020.
“People like to camp down there for a number of reasons, one of which is because it’s really inaccessible, particularly in the winter months,” LaBerge said. “We don’t send the [community safety officers] or the bylaw officers down because it’s just too slippery, so it gives people an uninterrupted period to really dig in. So, it just gets really big. It gets really messy and in the spring we try to deal with it.”
Firearms incidents this year also delayed bylaws and CSO officers and clean up crews from going in until police could secure the site and ensure no more weapons were present. LaBerge said he was told by police as many as 30 to 40 people were living in the camp, which extends 300 to 400 metres along the bluff between Terminal Avenue and the Millstone River.
“We started flying drones over it and having a look and we knew it was going to be a lot bigger cleanup than it was in past years,” he said.
The anticipated scale of the cleanup means higher projected costs for the operation, which necessitated securing a budget for it, developing safety plans and securing contractors and equipment for the job, which will again involve cranes hoisting debris up the bank an into trucks on Terminal Avenue. LaBerge said the estimated cost just for contractors and not including costs for city staff and labour is more than $25,000 and the cleanups have been getting bigger and more expensive.
“I told the neighbourhood that I was optimistic that we could get working the first week of July and, here we are, the first week of August, getting underway…” LaBerge said. “It’s a lot of people, a lot of planning and a lot of moving parts and quite expensive.”
Plans to barge debris out on the river aren’t practical because of low tides and how far the debris is scattered upriver.
People living in the camp were given warning in early July that clean-up crews were moving in, and the camp has been abandoned since mid July.
As far as taking measures to prevent people from moving back in, LaBerge said the topography and accessibility to the site, through what was become a vast network of trails, makes the site “permeable from all directions” and restricting access almost impossible. Meetings with the B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure to exchange ideas on ways to make the site more secure have failed to generate reliable solutions.
“It’s a big mess. It’s a nuisance and the neighbourhood concerns are really legitimate, but … it’s not our land and it’s tough position for us to keep trying to remediate property that we don’t even own,” LaBerge said.
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editor@nanaimobulletin.com
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