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Fish are back in the creek
A whiff of what?
Jennifer Moreau
The sweet smell of skunk:
staff reporter
The health of Byrne Creek is getting better after a March 4 chemical spill killed everything. “It’s recovering slowly. We’ve been releasing fish in there, and they have been surviving,” said Paul Cipywnyk of the Byrne Creek Streamkeepers. The volunteer stream stewards have been releasing small fish into the creek with the help of community members. The streamkeepers have also been freshening up storm drain markers – bright yellow fish symbols that remind people not to dump anything down storm drains. The March 4 spill killed the creek’s fish populations, including baby coho salmon that had just hatched and were emerging from the gravel and coho smolts that were almost ready to head out to sea. Resident cutthroat trout also perished. Volunteers from the Byrne Creek Streamkeepers counted about 500 dead fish but estimated 1,000 to 2,000 were killed in total. Environment Canada test results showed that various types of cleaning agents were released into the creek. According to the Fisheries Act, it’s illegal to dump substances harmful to fish or their habitat into waterways. Under the act, first-time offenders could be fined up to $300,000.
Nine-yearold Garrett Yeo gets a whiff of the pungent skunk spray at Metropolis at Metrotown. The mall is putting on Animal Grossology, an interactive display that features animal poo and farts in an educational and fun setting. The display opens today – see a sneak preview on page 3. Larry Wright/ burnaby now
Burnaby low on the Best Places to Live list Janaya Fuller-Evans
staff reporter
Burnaby may have been Canada’s bestrun city in 2009 but it placed low on a list of most livable cities in the country in 2010. MoneySense magazine ranked Burnaby 137 out of 179 cities across Canada on its annual Best Places to Live list. Burnaby dropped from its 94th-place ranking in 2009. But Mayor Derek Corrigan thinks it is still a pretty nice place to live, and pointed out that the many people who move here
seem to agree. “I’m still pretty proud of our portion of the world,” Corrigan said. Burnaby’s low ranking in the livability survey was affected by a literal damp cloud hanging over the city, according to Dan Bortolotti and Phil Froats, who wrote the story accompanying the survey. “In the precipitation department, we look for the sweet spot of 700 millilitres of rain or snow annually,” the pair wrote. “British Columbia communities lay at both extremes in this category: bone-
dry communities in the interior, such as Kelowna and Penticton, scored low, as did soggy coastal cities such as Prince Rupert and Burnaby.” Corrigan acknowledged that people who have an ability to move anywhere they like do consider the weather when doing so, mentioning his brother-in-law who started a business in Sydney, Australia, partially for that reason. But New Westminster ranked exactly the same as Burnaby, weather-wise, and placed at 50 on the annual list.
Both cities ranked at 146 out of the 179 cities for rain and snow days, and 173 for annual precipitation levels. Burnaby, however, also ranked low in the affordable housing category – at 175 – and was second-to-last for how long takes to buy a house here, at 7.6 years. Corrigan pointed out that factors such as the weather, housing affordability and average income are out of the municipality’s control. Cities such as Burnaby, located between other Lower Mainland cities and the ocean, don’t have the ability to expand City Page 8