A Black Diamond couple has nowhere to go after learning the campground they planned to spend the next few months at is closed.
James and Lena Martin had secured a renter for their Black Diamond home effective May 1 so they could spend the warmer months at the Bob Lochhead Memorial Park campground. Now they don’t know where to go after officials at Black Diamond’s Emergency Co-ordination Centre decided on April 13 to close the riverside campground in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The plan was to camp in the campground for the summer and probably move on to the coast, but right now we’re scrambling to find something,” said James. “This was going to be the first time that we were going to try this out.”
James said he understands the decision to close the campground to weekenders, but that it should remain open to seasonal campers.
“A lot of people depend on that campground – it’s their home for the summer,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense that they couldn’t open it up to people who go in for a few months at a time.”
Jamie Campbell, Black Diamond’s director of emergency management, said the decision was based on concerns about the risk of bringing COVID-19 to the community and the closure of provincial and federal campgrounds.
The closure includes seasonal campers, Campbell said, because many come from the United States, which is facing “rampant problems with COVID-19.”
“Our position is we’re following the government’s lead on what they’ve done with the provincial campgrounds,” he said. “Obviously some of the decisions we made are going to be popular with some folks and not so popular with others. We’re making them in the best interest of everybody.”
Campbell said the decision is one of medical importance to help flatten the curve of COVID-19 cases in Alberta. The number of confirmed cases in the province surpassed 2,000 this week.
“The last thing you want to do is bring potentially more risk into the community and bring somebody into town who may not know they have it,” he said. “A campground is a very difficult thing to manage because people could just wander in and out. You can’t control that, unfortunately, and that’s why the governments have taken that position and we’re following along with the same principles.
"There’s a risk for us to invite those people into our community and we just didn’t want to go there.”
The Bob Lochhead Memorial Park campground is not empty.
Campbell said two couples responsible for managing the grounds arrived a few weeks ago.
“Unfortunately they got in there before we were aware,” he said, adding they had since been self-isolated. “Had we been asked, we would have said ‘no.’ Our hope is the provincial and federal government will develop a plan for these folks coming to Canada. We should have been doing this in January and had a plan together.”
Campground chairman James Lee said as many as 40 per cent of the campground’s 50 sites fill with seasonal campers each year. Now some will have no place to go.
“Some of these people have been coming here for 20 years, living here for six months and supporting this community,” he said. “They’re snowbirds and sold their homes and live in their trailers. Those are the people we’re concerned about.”
This includes the couples who manage the campground, Lee said.
“They’ve been with us since 2012 and they’ve done an extraordinary job in that campground, especially after the devastation of the flood, and I don’t want to lay them off,” he said. “We might have to reduce their duties if they’re willing to go for that.”
Lee said while he understands why provincial and federal campgrounds are closing, regional campgrounds should stay open to seasonal campers. The campground has been operated through an agreement between the Foothills Lions Club and Town of Black Diamond since 1996, he said.
“This is a one-off situation but it’s hard on everybody and I don’t agree with it,” he said. “The optics don’t put the town in a great light, seeing as there are campgrounds open in Nanton, Okotoks, Cochrane, Balzac and Lethbridge. It doesn’t make the community look very compassionate.”
If the campground were to stay open to seasonal campers, Lee said federal and provincial guidelines around social distancing would have been followed.
“We would have taped off the sites of anybody who is self-isolating and the washrooms would be closed, plus we’d go above and beyond that,” he said.
Lee said the closure will hit the community hard, from the business campers bring to local shops to the $60,000 to $80,000 the Foothills Lions Club gives back to the communities from money made at the campground.
“We have lots of commitments like high school bursaries and things like that,” he said. “With the COVID-19 pandemic there’s going to be a greater need and we’re not going to have the resources to answer that need.”
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