What has been the relationship between previous logging in the watersheds and cloudy tap water?

Joe Foy
Campaigner, Western Canada Wilderness Committee

“Mountains aren’t supposed to have big horizontal cut lines across them. And it funnels, it catches the water and shoots it like a fire hose down the road. That causes erosion. One thing the [regional district] isn’t coming clean on is we’ve got erosion coming off those logging roads.”

Rob Kyle
Member, GVRD Regional Water Advisory Committee

“The vast majority of any landslides in the watersheds took place in unlogged areas”¦.You’re dealing with soil over solid rock in a lot of cases. When you get water flowing onto the rock, it provides a slippery surface for the soil to give way, even if there is trees on there.”

Will Koop
Coordinator, BC Tap Water Alliance

“The major amount of turbidity is coming from the Sisters Creek drainage. There is a sub-branch on the Sisters called Strachan Creek. That’s the area where the Capilano Timber Company logged. They got into the Sisters, in that area, about 1925 on”¦.It’s really running thick brown.”

Peter Pearse
Former chair, GVRD scientific-advisory panel on watershed management

“It had very little to do with logging, almost nothing to do with logging. There were...minor causes, having to do with roads and things like that. But overwhelmingly, it was the slippage of those very fine deposits off the mountain that were not associated with logging.”