Kane Blake’s latest discovery of garbage dumped in the woods has him even more angry than usual.
The president of the Okanagan Forest Task Force, which has taken to identifying and cleaning up garbage dumped in remote wooded areas around Kelowna, came across the latest trash pile Sunday morning while out on his all-terrain vehicle.
In addition to bags of garbage that were split open, he found 10 five-gallon containers of oil, some of which were leaking.
But that wasn’t all he found. In amongst the garbage was personal information about the person the garbage belonged to, information that included pay stubs identifying the name, address and where he works, or worked.
But Blake said while the information has been recorded and passed on to the B.C. Conservation Service, the OFTF does not plan to make the person’s identity public.
“Our group is not into public shaming—as much as I would like to,” said Blake. “We have to tread very carefully.”
He said the trash could have been dumped by someone else.
But he repeated his call for strengthened provincial action to stop such illegal dumping, saying currently, someone found to have dumped garbage on Crown land simply gets what he called a “slap on the wrists” and is told not to do it again.
Blake made his latest discovery just off Postill Lake Road, at the bottom steep slope. Postill Lake Road and the Gillard Forest Service Road have become trash dumping “hot spots” of late, he said. Both are known, out-of-the-way, outdoor party areas but are also used by outdoor enthusiats.
Given the amount of garbage discovered Sunday, it appears a truck may have just backed up to the side of the road, had its tail gate dropped and the trash shoveled out down the slope.
What Blake finds particularly upsetting about the oil dumping is that used motor oil can be taken to many automotive dealerships and shops in Kelowna to be disposed of, in many cases at no charge. One local shop even uses old motor oil to power burners that heat its repair shop in the winter, he added
Blake estimated the total cost of taking the rest of the garbage that was dumped to the Glenmore landfill would have been $10.