Pit Stop Sechelt
Check out the photo below. This is a pretty freaky PutTogether of ‘North America’s Largest Open Pit Sand & Gravel Mine’.
Y’know how I know that? Cause pop was prez of Lehigh/Heidleberg Cement Group, which owns ‘the Pit’ as it is affectionately referred to (not). As an ‘Irvine Girl’ I grew up knowing that when a kid pushed me down I hit my head … ON CONCRETE, DUMMY! Cement is to concrete, as flour is to a cake, yadayada.
Pop used to take me on drives through Sechelt back in the day (20 years ago) to ‘listen to the pit’. Well, I can tell you since the conveyor belt and barge facility went in in 2000, I don’t need no drive around the village to give a listen; I can hear it direct from my house (the house the gravel pit bought) in West Sechelt just fine, thank you.
If you want the full stats about our lunar landscape – completed areas presently being terraformed with biosolids and poplars – here’s a nifty link:
http://dieselduck.blogspot.com/2008/02/between-rock-and-hard-place-is-ocean.html
I did not know the barge terminal has a loading rate of 4,500 tonnes of sand, crushed rock or small stone an hour and is fed by a 1.1 kilometre conveyor from the mine, or that it has 50 years of material in reserve.
Oh, well, Pop’s grandgirls have grit in their blood already, and practically grew up listening to those gravelly tones and tonnes rolling down the conveyor anyway.
By then the mountain will probably have been so denuded (ugh) that a pure, unadulterated southeasterly wind is going to be rolling down Sechelt Inlet unabated (you didn’t know that 25 years ago barely a breeze kicked up in our ‘inland lake’, did you?
