Trees fall as LRT construction surges west
Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: November 13, 2019
For residents on Parkway Crescent near Iris Street transit station, construction of Stage 2 of Ottawa’s LRT arrived early one October morning with the whine of chainsaws.
Work crews were cutting a nearly 40-year-old forest — tall stands of maple, oak, black walnut and rare butternut trees — as they got ready to reshape the landscape for the rail’s arrival.
“You can forget about sleeping in,” said Lorraine Renaud, a retiree who lives with her husband, Brian, at the corner of Parkway and Iris Street.
What’s left of the forest is now a pile of slash and wood chips, with carefully stacked rows of hardwood logs. It looks more like a logging company’s clearcut than the once-tranquil forest that was home to rabbits, foxes and even the occasional deer and coyote.
“It makes no sense to me to destroy green space,” says Stanley McBride, another Parkway Crescent resident. “It’s the lifeblood of the city. It’s what attracts people to Ottawa.
“I think light rail is an excellent idea — it’s been a long time coming — but I really didn’t expect them to be removing this many trees.”
Crews are clearing out the woodlot to make way for Iris Station, the second last stop on the Confederation Line West extension to Baseline Road. The new rail lines, which should be ready for service in 2025, follow the existing bus transitway south from Lincoln Fields Station along Pinecrest Creek, under the Queensway and on to the terminus of Stage 2 at Algonquin College.
It’s a tricky engineering problem that requires Pinecrest Creek to be rerouted to a new course west of the LRT tracks. The stretch of track from Lincoln Fields to Baseline runs through the creek’s floodplain so the city is building a large storm water pond on NCC land on the east side of Woodroffe Avenue along the Experimental Farm Pathway to hold the overflow from rain storms.
The storm water ponds are part of the “unified hydrology” plan for the creek, says Michael Morgan, the city’s director of rail construction and the man overseeing LRT Stage 2.
“We know there’s a lots of questions about butternut trees in this area and we’re sensitive to that,” Morgan said. “People think of a storm water pond and they think of a big rectangular massive structure, but this is more of a park. We’ll be planting and adding lots of trees in this area.”
In fact, the city is promising to plant two trees for every tree it removes as part of its re-greening project. The cutting is happening now so birds don’t nest in them next spring and disrupt next summer’s construction season.
Another casualty of the tree clearing is an orchard of crab apple trees near Lincoln Fields Station, one of the most spectacular in the city and a magnet for local artists and photographers. The trees, which were planted in the mid 1970s, are near the end of their 40 to 50-year lifespan and sit in the middle of where the new Lincoln Fields LRT station will be.
And more big trees are coming down along Pinecrest Creek south of Lincoln Fields, where the Confederation Line splits, with one line heading west toward Bayshore and the other south through Iris Station to Baseline. Connaught Avenue resident Dave Krochmalnek posted photos of one massive oak marked for cutting on his neighbourhood’s Facebook page.
“I was sad to think this summer was the last time I would see it with leaves on. We don’t adequately value 100+ year trees in our society,” he wrote.
“At the end of the day I can understand that if a tree has to go, it has to go,” Krochmalnek said in an interview. “But when I look at the posts of where (the LRT) is going to be built, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be in the way. If they’d put some thought into saving the big trees. They could probably move a few feet over to the south and go through some trees that are in rougher shape.
“I know they’re replanting, but it’s going to take years and years to get back to the way it was.”
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