Sylvie Whaley has a pet cemetery out back. She just lost her sixth animal since 1995, and has concerns that the next hit-and-run will be a small child.
Whaley lives on Wellington Road 16, in Damascus. She had to expand her pet cemetery just this week for her son’s one-year-old dog Dakota, which is like a family member.
But the pets aren’t the only family members Whaley worries about. She is a foster mother, and has many friends within the hamlet who also have small children.
Whaley said even though the speed limit through the hamlet is 50 km/hr, many vehicles go through there at a minimum of 15 km over. She knows this because she bought her son Allen a speed monitor a couple of years ago, and they sat and tracked vehicles going through. They found that almost no one slowed down to the speed limit, with most around 15km over, and some even faster.
“I don’t go through town doing 80km, so people going through here should respect our speed limit,” Whaley said.
She said she has seen trucks barrelling down the hill (from the south) and they can’t stop. “Some kid is going to get it coming out the store,” Whaley said.
She added there have been several times she has been out for a walk and had to jump into the ditch to avoid being struck by a fast vehicle, mostly trucks, she said, which have a suction behind them, and take up more space.
Whaley said the hamlet has grown substantially since she moved in, and there are a lot more children in the area. She said there are almost 20 small children within the Wellington Road 16 portion of the hamlet. There are many more on the side road through the hamlet, and many of these are out and about.
Whaley said one possible solution to the issue is to have Damascus named a Community Safety Zone, where fines are increased, and to decrease the speed limit through the hamlet to 40, and possibly to have a four-way-stop installed at the intersection.
And she’s concerned it might get worse, if a proposed Limestone Quarry goes through in Monck, which would increase truck traffic exponentially.
“Sometimes I wish it was still gravel,” Whaley said, because then traffic didn’t move anywhere near as fast.
Whaley’s pet cemetery now holds three cats and three dogs, many of which were considered part of her family. She still has several pets, as well as three foster children who she worries about, even though they are all slightly older.