Burnaby Now July 22 2015

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Sprinkling now banned City moves to Stage 3 water restrictions

Cornelia Naylor

cnaylor@burnabynow.com

ON THE CASE Surrey student Japnit Bhatia collects a “blood” sample last Thursday at a mock crime scene in a BCIT dorm room. Bhatia was one of 20 students participating in the technical institute’s popular CSI Academy, a summer science camp that gives students a taste of forensic investigation. PHOTO CORNELIA NAYLOR

Teens take a stab at forensics

High school students investigate dummy-icide at popular summer camp Cornelia Naylor

cnaylor@burnabynow.com

Twenty high school students were at BCIT last week, searching for clues after the discovery of two bloodied and lifeless dummies. The dummies were found lying in the bathrooms of two identical dorm rooms, and the mock crime-scene investigation was the culmination of the technical institute’s popular summer CSI Academy. After three days of learning about forensic fields like fingerprinting, anthropology, DNA, chemical-trace evidence, knot

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and video analysis, students in the summer science camp were divided into two teams and challenged to unravel the mystery of the apparent dummy-icide. “The idea is just to expose them to a whole bunch of different types of forensics to see if there’s anything that they’re interested in, and then it can maybe inform their future careers if that’s something that they decide they want to pursue,” said camp organizer Steen Hartsen, who teaches forensic DNA at BCIT and manages the DNA lab on campus. The weeklong, 20-seat camp was started in 2001 and is more

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popular than ever, with organizers having to turn kids away from this year’s camp. “Usually they’re very, very keen students who are really interested in science,” Hartsen said of the typical CSI camper. “They’re usually very, very into the whole forensic angle as well.”

They’re very, very keen students who are really interested in science.

Burnaby Mountain Grade 12 student Bailey Bridge, whose parents are both RCMP mem-

bers, is one such student. “I just thought it would be a good way to figure out what I was into, like the deeper parts of the subject,” she said. Learning about knots from expert John Van Tassel, a pioneer of forensic knot-analysis, was especially interesting, Bridge said, as was finding out interesting facts about bones – like that humans don’t have knee caps until about age four. “It’s all been quite interesting,” she said. Students spent a day and a half at the mock crime scene last week and then shared their findings at a classroom session Friday. For more information, visit www.bcit.ca/cas/forensics/csi academy.

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While lawns brown and water restrictions tighten, Burnaby’s chafer beetles are poised to thrive next spring. Metro Vancouver moved to Stage 3 water restrictions Tuesday morning, ramping up water conservation measures, including a ban on all lawn sprinkling with treated drinking water. The timing couldn’t be worse for residents looking to use nematodes to control European chafer beetles. This is the time of year the nematodes should be applied to lawns, and the microscopic groundworms require two weeks of daily watering to effectively destroy beetle larvae. But Burnaby deputy director of engineering Dipak Dattani told the NOW that, as of Monday, the city is not issuing any new permits. Local residents who ordered subsidized nematodes from the city in June and picked them up before Metro Vancouver increased water restrictions this week will be allowed to sprinkle their lawns for two weeks if they were issued exemption permits, but those exemptions will not be extended, Dattani said. The deputy director was optimistic the nematodes of those with permits would be effective, however, especially if short periods of rain, like those on Tuesday continued. “They just need enough of the ground to be moist to be mobile,” he said. “After that they will just search out the larvae.” Dry weather prompted B.C. to declare a Level 4 drought last week, and Metro Vancouver has moved to Stage 3 water restrictions for the first time in 12 years in order to head off potential water shortages in the future. “We have implemented Stage 3 water use restrictions to help ensure that we have the necessary supply of water through the early fall for use in our homes and businesses, and for critical community needs such as fire suppression,” Metro chief administrative officer Carol Mason told the Vancouver Sun. For more information on activities restricted under Stage 3, visit www.metro vancouver.org. – with files from theVancouver Sun.

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