The stairs to the beach at Witty’s Lagoon have won a temporary reprieve.
Capital Regional District staff had recommended the stairs off Witty Beach Road be removed at a cost of about $10,000 after engineering reports said the slope on which they are built is unstable.
The engineering reports say stabilizing the slope and rebuilding the stairs would cost between $700,000 and $1.3 million.
The slope, they say, has a history of failure due to natural erosion and is only marginally stable. They provided three options: rip-rap the shoreline, provide tiered retaining walls or insert anchors into the slope.
But at the suggestion of Metchosin Mayor John Ranns, CRD directors asked for an assessment of how other jurisdictions manage such risks, instead of ordering the stairs removed.
The stairs, built on a Metchosin right of way, have been a popular access point to the beach and have been used by about 30,000 people a year.
Ranns said it’s “time to bring some sense into the parks system” and argued that the slope hasn’t moved in more than 60 years. “Anybody visiting there, I think, would also acknowledge that the likelihood of it slipping is pretty low,” he said. “We’ve got lots of engineering on this, but we don’t have any information as a board on risk management and how it’s handled.”
Ranns said many state and national parks in the United States have “astonishing hazards,” and although the U.S. is the most litigious country in the world, “their parks seem to be able to get away with having virtually no safety measures in a multitude of ways.”
Once the Witty’s Lagoon stairs are removed, “they’re gone and that access will never be back again,” Ranns said.
Several directors spoke in favour of Ranns’s motion to refer the issue back to staff.
Victoria Coun. Ben Isitt, who recently visited the site, said the problem with the stairs and the risk appear to be manageable. Park infrastructure — including bike racks, a visitor kiosk and a parking lot — would be lost if the stairs were removed, he said.
“All of this infrastructure is now essentially redundant and is just lost expenditures to the region and its taxpayers,” Isitt said. Someone has already wrapped tape on a neighbouring barbed-wire fence to continue to gain access, even though the CRD blocked the stairs, he said.
Juan de Fuca director Mike Hicks, calling himself a “hillbilly engineer from the West Coast,” said there’s little risk of the slope sloughing.
“It would only slough in case of huge rains,” he said. “I don’t believe there is going to be a slide and if there is, it would just be so minor a sloughing someone might just stub their toe. That would be the casualty on the staircase. But it’s not like it’s going to fall down and everyone is going to die.”
Hicks and others said they didn’t want to create another situation like Jordan River. Camping was suspended by the CRD at a Jordan River campsite because of the threat posed by an upstream dam in a major earthquake.
