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Members of the Penticton Fire Department were busy late this morning at the Ikeda Japanese Garden koi pond, adjacent to the Penticton Art Gallery, cleaning up what attending PFD Captain Graham Gowe described as an "oily substance."
"We had a call that there was a substance in the pond," said Gowe. "When we got on the scene there was about a five meter square oily substance on top of the water."
Gowe said it was "dry, almost like cellophane when we started collecting it."
"So we put a boom around it. We got spill pads. We've got most of it picked up, but we still have a few little pieces that we're using a pool skimmer to pick up."
Gowe wasn't certain of the substance makeup, though he said it appeared similar to roofing tar or asphalt. "It almost reminds me of cellophane. When we started to coral it, we could pull it together and just make one big blob."
When PentictonNow arrived, firefighters were busy collecting the material at the section of the pier closest to the centre of the pond. Gowe confirmed that's where the vast majority of it was gathered, though he would not officially say if that indicated the drop spot.
"There was some on the deck (pier) itself, which we've also cleaned up. It was just starting to migrate under the deck there."
"But nothing has gone into the lake. We've turned the water off into the pond. I don't think any of the fish were affected. Because it stayed on the surface, it didn't mix with the water. So we're feeling pretty confident that we got it all."
Gowe said he believes the substance was deposited in the pond "sometime overnight or early morning. It would have moved all over the place if it was longer than that. But this was easy for us to collect."
As for locating the person(s) responsible, Gowe gestured to a pair of nearby security cameras, saying, "There are cameras here, so we hope we can access that."