Lions Bay property owner says he’s cleared of any wrongdoing after deadly landslide

The owner of the land upstream from a fatal landslide in Lions Bay is speaking out.

The owner of the private property uphill from December’s deadly landslide is speaking out, saying the provincial government has cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Steve Vestergaard says he became friends with David and Barbara Enns after buying the land in 1999.

“Lions Bay referred to us as the pioneers,” Vestergaard told CTV News.

“We were completely off grid, access to the highway was through a U-turn on the highway,” he continued.

“We formed a little community.”

Vestergaard says he received a phone call from a Metro Vancouver official the day of the landslide, notifying him it was the Enns’ home that was wiped out.

He hoped they were away on vacation at the time, but tragically, they were not.

“They were really nice people, and they didn’t deserve this,” he said.

The landslide happened below a dam structure Vestergaard had built at the request of the province to improve the water quality of the reservoir built by the previous owner.

“It wasn’t really a creek as much as a swamp where the water intake was green, people in Brunswick beach were drinking that water,” he said.

“It was disgusting.”

Vestergaard says he complied immediately when the province issued a stop work order in 2014, and that all of the work done on the land has been properly permitted and approved.

He says the dam did not fail on Dec. 14, and that the government has cleared him of any wrongdoing.

“I was cleared before Christmas,” said Vestergaard.

“They told me natural causes, but they didn’t say what the natural causes were,” he added.

CTV News reached out to the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship about the investigation, but were told they would respond at a later date.

Vestergaard said in August, Battani creek and the entire side of the mountain ran dry, leaving the landscape susceptible to the ‘bomb cyclone’ that swept through the region the day of the slide.

“The trees were being anchored to the rock by basically dust,” he said.

Sea to Sky RCMP has an on-going investigation into the slide but has shared very little detail about it. It hasn’t accused anybody, including Vestergaard of any wrongdoing.

Vestergaard is urging to province to provide funding for recommendations made to Lions Bay in 2018.

“This is going to happen again if somebody doesn’t get in front of it,” he said.

“It’s not human caused, but we can protect each other.”

With files from CTV News Vancouver’s Ian Holliday