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Vandals damage Myrtle Philip fields

Damage will be visible for months

Myrtle Philip Community School's annual sports day started under a cloud on Friday morning (June 21) after a truck drove onto the lower soccer fields the previous night and caused extensive damage.

Municipal administrator Mike Furey said it looked as if the driver was doing doughnuts on the field, which was already soft as a result of heavy rain that day.

The damage occurred between 8 p.m. on Thursday night (June 20) and about 7 a.m. on Friday morning when the damage was reported.

Although the field was blocked off from the Easy Street side, it appears that the truck drove through a gap in the upper parking lot at the school, and then drove down onto the field. The municipality is talking to the school district about closing off that gap, and had a crew on site all day Friday to try and mitigate the damage, with an estimated cost of $2,000 for seeding, aerating and dressing the turf. However, Furey said he expects some of the damage to be visible for most of the summer.

"It will eventually disappear, but it will be visible for a number of months," said Furey. "The major challenge we have in restoring it is that this is literally the busiest time of the year for the fields and it's going to be hard to get it back into the condition it was in before this incident."

Mayor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden said the event was really disappointing. "We don't see this kind of thing very often and our sports fields are something that is really important to the community here," she said.

"To have this kind of vandalism in particular — not that any is good — is particularly disappointing because it's the elementary school, and this happened the day before their annual sports day."

The RCMP attended the scene.If anyone has any information they are asked to call the RCMP at 604 932 3044.