A Vancouver woman is trying to save the pond in South Memorial Park, as she says it’s turning into a slimy mudflat due to a lack of water.
For 12 years, Kathryn Langmead says she’s gone to South Memorial Pond to relax. But these days, she says it breaks her heart to visit in its current state, which she describes as “stagnant and slimy and covered in algae.”
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The Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation isn’t adding water to the pond because a spokesperson says it doesn’t comply with a city by-law that prohibits the use of drinking water in water features that don’t recirculate it.
The park board now considers it a “seasonal wetland” – a move Langmead says is destroying a once beautiful place where both animals and people in the neighborhood gathered.
“This is our only park, this is our only refuge, it’s like the jewel of the city, of our neighborhood — they’ve taken it away from us.”
Langmead wants the pond, which she says used to be packed with wildlife, filled, especially since city council and the park board recently exempted several fountains from the bylaw. A petition she recently started now has hundreds of signatures.
“They’re just making us suffer, it’s like this passive-aggressive bullying they’re doing to our neighborhood,” said Langmead.
“They keep the sports fields really well watered, but they can’t spare any for us.”
A park board spokesperson says an investigation into why the pond is losing water determined a weir — which helps keep the water in — was cracked. They add this was repaired, but the pond is still losing water through the ground and evaporation.
Commissioner Tom Digby says he voted against the motion to exempt the water fountains.
“In this era of climate change, we can’t just randomly pump water at great expense to the city for every need.”
“What we need … is a proper rainwater capture somehow in the area and that can be used to source the pond rather than pumping water from the Capilano Reservoir 20 miles away right into the pond and then having it trickle out,” he said.
The park board spokesperson says the pond is among the water features it is considering for repairs, retrofitting, or new water management approaches with a Water Action Plan Update set to go before commissioners later this year.
In the meantime, Langmead tells CityNews she wants the water levels topped up.
“It’s a tragic loss, to lose our wildlife and lose the only place we have to go, to get away from the stress and the heat, we don’t have anything now.”