The Mayor of Lytton says he is relieved to see work to remove debris finally get underway, almost nine months after a wildfire damaged parts of the community.
Jan Polderman was speaking on the NL Morning News, one day after the provincial government announced it has earmarked $18.4 million towards debris removal, archeological work, and soil remediation in Lytton.
“The residents have been very frustrated with sort of the lack of knowledge of exactly when we are going to start the debris removal and the cleanup and the rebuild,” Polderman said.
“[Based on] the timelines that I’ve sort of seen, we should have the village cleaned up by September, the beginning of September, when residents will be able to begin rebuilding their homes.”
Clean up work in Lytton began this morning at the site of the old firehall in Lytton. Crews will start clearing debris like ash, soot, metals, bricks, and other building materials with municipal properties before moving on to the residential ones.
“We are going to start with the debris that is on the surface, the removal of that, off of the village properties,” Polderman added. “And that’s…you know…the testing needs to be done for the toxicity as that will determine which site it ends up in.”
Public Safety Minister, Mike Farnworth, says the province will pick up the tab while also funding temporary accommodations for as many as 30 staff, consultants, and construction workers on site, along with the project management and engineering design work costs, plus on-site security.
“The site was very much a toxic site and so there has to be dealing with the toxic materials that we there,” Farnworth said, when asked why it took this long to get to this point.
“There had to be a lot of sifting done on a volunteer basis to try and recover what personal artifacts remained for people. At the same time, we were working very closely with the Village of Lytton in terms of their capacity to function.”
Most of the village of Lytton was ravaged by a wildfire nearly nine months ago, on June 30, 2021.