The Community of Berkeley And Sixty Sideroad
Also known as
“THE BERKELEY ROAD”
It’s a beautiful farm. The Double B Farm.
It’s loss is more than the crops it yields, though. The costs to taxpayers, to farmers, the risks to air, water and soil, health and safety perhaps could be calculated mathematically.
How to put a dollars and cents cost to a way of life?
From certain vantage points, the Hamlet of Berkeley, situated on the crossroads of Hwy 10 and 60 Sideroad, has the same look and feel as it did in the 40s and 50s. There’s an old, almost 200 years old, still working post office where you have to bend down to peek beyond the grill and chat with the postmistress, Vera. Behind her, the quilt she’s working on is spread out on its frame. There’s a church, a couple of farms, a gas station, small family homes with no set back from the road. One side sidewalk.
Some people might say “There’s nothing here to keep it going. Let Berkeley go.”
There’s a carpenter building bee boxes. Hardworking, young family.
There’s a farmer raising “Reserve Champion” goats. Another hardworking, young family.
There’re cattle farmers, and others who raise alpacas, rabbits, race horses. There’s light industry and commerce and “cottage” industries………..
And then there’s us. The older, retired folk seeking the tranquility of our last years.
There’s Kurt, 88 year old cyclist, observing every feature of the environment, as he cycles a 10 km trip every day along the Berkeley Road.
There’re the old couples walking hand in hand down the road. Mothers with babies in their strollers. Horses and riders. Children playing in front of their homes. Crossing to Berkeley Park. School buses stop, blinking a warning as school children jump down onto the road, 7 buses, twice a day.
There’s the Bell’s Lake Provincially Significant Wetlands. And the Boy Scout Troops that make it their virtual classroom. Dads with toddlers, pointing out the long legged birds on Sargents Lake. Its banks, a mere metre from the road’s edge.
We have a “road life”. It’s a country road. Not too much traffic. Locals are careful about the S-bend. Drivers slow down and move around the old couples with their dogs, the riders, the kids.
People stop their cars, get out and pick up a turtle crossing from one side of the wetlands to the other. When we do, hikers stop to chat. We hang out in the middle of the roadway. A neighbour pulls over, we lean into the rolled down window to say “hi”.
All this is life on the road. A road with narrow shoulders.
Not meant for 100 trucks, a day. 20,000 ton trucks transporting gravel from the proposed Bumstead Pit, spewing dust and diesel fumes into the air. Crowding into the intersection, idling their motors, waiting to turn onto Hwy 10. In the summer. Twelve hours a day. For the next 18 – 20 years. When we’re all on the road.
Not anymore.
The children will be called in.
The windows will be closed. Screens will be caked solid with dust.
It’ll be so noisy outside and the air will fill with the acrid odour of diesel fumes. Gives people headaches. Cyclists and riders will have disappeared. The strollers will be gone. The old couples turn their backs away from the swirling dust clouds.
The turtles………………
Droplets of motor oil slick the surface of the wetlands, nature’s own water filtration system. For all 1500 acres of drinking water.
It’ll be suddenly quiet on the Berkeley Road. For about 7 or 8 minutes. The dust won’t even have had time to settle. Except on Sundays and holidays.
There are countless country roads like ours in Grey County. How many of these “road lives” have withered and died under the excesses of ambition? The “Berkeley Road” could be next.
The mostly 3rd grade gravel isn’t needed for roads here, says the Township of Chatsworth. And the Ministry of Transport is credited with using 62% less aggregate on provincial highways.
There are 138 licensed pits in Grey County, not all of them operational.
If this gravel pit is needed, if the 100 acre Double B Farm, in the middle of a residential, young business and farming community, is the only available source for it, then prove it. That’s all. Prove it.
Don’t let this Community suffer the harm and expenses just so 2 people can add millions of dollars to their retirement fund.
Mister government officials, proponents and their consultants, don’t wave the legislation in the air like it was the Ten Commandments. It isn’t.
2.5 Mineral Aggregate Resources
2.5.2.2 “Demonstration of need for mineral aggregate resources, including any type of supply/demand analysis , shall not be required.”
We, on the Berkeley Road require it.
Anne Kurita
Berkeley, Ontario
Anne Kurita