For full article, please visit the Squamish Chief. Story by Jennifer Crunch.
The bright-yellow sign nailed to two wooden beams and leaning on the entrance gate of the new Mamquam River Campground is hard to miss, or misread.
“Campground closed due to silly bureaucracy,” the sign says in large black print.
The campground’s creator, John Harvey of the Mamquam River Access Society, is exasperated having to close the new much-anticipated, affordable campground about one week after it opened July 1 because its four outhouses were not approved.
Vancouver Coastal Health’s environmental health department issued a Public Health Act Order in response to an unapproved holding tank at the campground, according to the health authority.
“Under the Public Health Act, we issued an order to prohibit the discharge of sewage into an unapproved holding tank. What has been installed at the site does not meet minimum design standards under the BC Sewerage System Regulation,” Vancouver Coastal Health spokesperson Anna Marie D’Angelo told The Chief.
Harvey had to close the camp until the situation was dealt with, he said.
Harvey told The Chief he built what he considers to be above standard outhouses on site that have concrete bases.
“It is bomb proof,” he said. “It is 16 gauge, it is galvanized metal, about four feet in diameter… and it is buried into a cubic metre of concrete and up on little blocks, so the concrete went out the outside and up the inside.”
Vancouver Coastal Health officials want Harvey to install a plastic holding tank, which Harvey said will cost “thousands of more fundraised dollars.”
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