City declines to blow up burrows at cemetery
By Kyra Hoggan
The city is refraining from taking a page from the movie Caddyshack, despite the fact it has gopher control problems at the Castlegar Cemetery.
City councillor Kevin Chernoff said the city will, instead, be looking at humane ways to manage the rodent problem.
“What’s happening is, rodents (gophers) are causings some erosion problems around headstones and that kind of thing because they’re burrowing,” Chernoff explained.
“If we leave it unchecked, the problem is just going to get worse and worse, because they tend to multiply rather quickly.”
He said the City of Trail had a similar problem at the Rossland cemetery, and originally attempted to employ an extermination solution.
“I think it was poison,” Chernoff said. “They had a public outcry in Trail over that, and slowly refined their process to find one that was both humane and effective. We don’t want to re-invent the wheel here, so we’re in discussion with (Trail officials) as to how they handled this.”
He said it has been a real education, though, researching some of the more extreme measures recommended on the Internet – one, he said, called the “verminator”, pumps propane throughout the burrow system, then lights it …blowing up the entire network of gopher homes.
“We’re not exploring options like that,” he said. “There some really weird methods out there for gettng rid of gophers. All you have to do is Google ‘gopher control’ …”
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