Extensive cutting by NCC in protected area of Mud Lake called 'carnage'
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: April 26, 2018 | Last Updated: April 26, 2018 2:28 PM EDT
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Residents near Mud Lake, one of Ottawa’s protected natural areas, have been shocked by the National Capital Commission’s decision to cut down the trees and shrubs growing beside a narrow forest path.
Residents thought the NCC was just taking out a few diseased trees over the winter in the area, formally known as the Britannia Conservation Area.
Then the snow melted, and people started walking through the woods again. Where they used to have branches brushing against their arms as they walked, there’s now room to drive a good-sized truck, and sometimes two side by side.
One section of the widened path measures 18 metres wide.
“It is carnage,” says Annie Boucher, president of the Lincoln Heights Community Association and a regular walker in the site. “It looks like they were clearing for a road.”
“It used to be a place where humans could sneak up on nature and peek through the trees,” said Herb Weber, who lives nearby. “Now there is nothing to look at except wood chips.” He calls it “a clearcut.”
And the crews have left behind all the chipped-up wood, in effect spreading a layer of coarse mulch that will suppress new growth.
The woods surrounding Mud Lake are a swamp forest and a wetland that is designated as provincially significant. They are also a designated Area of Natural and Scientific Interest in Ottawa — on the same ecological level as Mer Bleue, the Burnt Lands, Stony Swamp and Shirleys Bay. And the NCC has designated the area as being of national significance.
“What we had there before was bush on both sides (of the path) and three to four feet between it and that’s it,” Weber said Thursday.
“So the official story is that they cut down ash trees (because of) the ash borer. But they have cut down everything. It’s clearcut.
“And you could say, OK, something is going to grow back in. But what they left is a thick carpet of chipping residue and nothing is going to grow there. This is big chips and it is a deep pile.
“This is absolute nonsense … It is supposed to be a conservation area. It is supposed to be nature doing its thing.”
He estimates the length of the cut area at 600 to 700 metres. The NCC says it is 250 metres.
The federal agency said it had to do the cutting for the sake of safety, as ash trees are dying and may fall on someone.
“We did cut down about 200 trees in a 250-metre length. Those were ash trees” that were dead or dying, said spokeswoman Dominique LeBlanc.
“For the health and safety of the public we can’t leave trees that are diseased or dead because it causes a hazard for the public.”
“There is a lot of mulch there. We prefer it to decompose naturally because if we were to bring trucks in and try to take it out, it would have a higher imprint on the nature of the area,” she said.
The NCC will plant about 75 native trees in the cut area, she said.
Dan Brunton, an environmental consultant who helped draw up the NCC’s formal plan for Britannia Woods and Mud Lake in 2004, says the area has been officially rated with the highest possible ecological importance.
And he said most of the trees and shrubs that were cut are not ash.
He wrote this week to the NCC: “Who was your trail clearing contractor … Rommel’s Panzer Division?! That’s not trail maintenance or upgrading, that’s ecological vandalism worthy of the mechanized shrub and tree slashing used to clear mile after mile of Interstate highway edges in the southern United States! Aside from representing an inexcusable disfigurement of this swamp forest, the slash is vastly wider than ANY pedestrian trail ROW (right-of-way) needs to be, let alone one through an ecological sensitive habitat.”
And he says the wood waste is “spread around in a solid, suffocating layer. This might as well be concrete or plastic as far anything living is concerned. It’s a total death zone.”
Mulching on Mud Lake trails is forbidden under the NCC’s plan, he said in an interview. And the plan also calls for the trail to be no more than one metre wide.
“There won’t be wildlife using (the open area) unless they are just trying to get the hell across it,” he said.
tspears@postmedia.com
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