ATV riders 'making a mess' of restored Sydney coke ovens site

The former chair of a group that worked for years to get the infamous coke ovens and tar ponds site in Sydney, N.S., cleaned up, is once again raising concern about the state of the former coke ovens property.

"ATVs and two-wheelers are driving obviously up and down across this grassed area ... and they're making a mess," Dan Fraser said as he surveyed a damaged section of the site on Tuesday.

Now president of the Isle Royale ATV Club, Fraser said he enjoys using the trail, which skirts the perimeter of the property. He said he's "blown away" that "uncaring" riders are driving on its large grass areas, ripping up the multi-million-dollar cover that was installed as part of the remediation process several years ago.

Donnie Burke, executive director with Nova Scotia Lands, the provincial Crown corporation that's responsible for the property, said it's mostly youth between 12 and 18 doing the damage.

"We've stopped them and talked to them," he said. "Now they kind of just, pardon the expression, flip us the bird and away they go."

The remediated coke ovens site is covered with about a half-metre of clay, plus some topsoil and grass, and has been engineered so clean surface water is directed into brooks and off the site, but the damage from offroad vehicles is interfering with that process.

"The freshwater will sit in these ruts," said Burke. "And of course, it's standing water, it's going to percolate through the clay layer ... and so the volumes that we treat, in terms of water that we have to treat on site, grows incrementally as this percolates down through."

He said some barriers at the site were extended recently to help keep offroad vehicles from entering the site.

There's no public health concern, said Burke, but he's hoping to find a way to keep riders off the site, before spending thousands of dollars on repairs.