It is an appendix in the City’s Groundwater Management Bulletin, and Oakridge is the only Vancouver neighbourhood that gets one. It records that groundwater has been extracted from the Oakridge Mall site at 41st and Cambie since 1958, that levels are estimated to have been lowered by up to 6 metres, and that the lowered level is to be roughly maintained but may change over time.

Not permanently. The City’s bulletin says permanent dewatering or drainage of water from saturated soils is not permitted to be discharged to the City’s sewer system, and it names permanent on site drainage infrastructure such as perimeter and foundation drains. The reason it gives is that the sewer within the Cambie Corridor is approaching capacity.

Close to a coin flip. 503 of the 1,059 City main segments inside Oakridge are combined, 47.5%, and 40.9% of the whole set is vitrified clay. In the Laurel Street corridor it runs higher, 21 of 35 segments. We can tell you what is under your block before we come out.

On some streets. W 49th Avenue between Oak and Cambie was separated between 2022 and 2024. The current work covers 49th Avenue east of Cambie and Alberta Street between W 49th and W 44th, replacing the old system with one pipe for rainwater runoff and another for sewage, on a main the City rates for a 100 year life. No schedule has been published for the other streets and we will not invent one.

Your side follows. You are responsible for the sewer lines on your property up to where they meet the City’s connection, and By-law 8093 section 2.6 says that in a separate system area no stormwater may be conveyed into a sanitary sewer and no wastewater into a storm sewer. The City’s guidance is to call a private plumbing contractor to scope it and pull the permits.

We will not guess. City open data covers the mains and explicitly excludes residential connections to them, so nobody publishes what runs under your lot. What we can say is that on the Cambie side of Oakridge 49.3% of the standing houses went up between 1940 and 1969, and that four in ten City mains here are still clay. The camera settles the rest.

Sometimes, and the honest version is less dramatic than the usual pitch. Oakridge boulevards are mostly ornamental cherry and plum planted after the houses went in. Laurel Street runs to Kwanzan cherry, Heather Street to Pink Perfection cherry and European beech, Osler Street to Japanese flowering crabapple. The heavy rooted trees in the count are 826 western red cedar, 255 Douglas fir and 131 black cottonwood, and cottonwood is the one that finds a cracked lateral.

Because it is downhill. The ground sits around 95 to 100 metres at 41st and Oak and falls to roughly 40 to 55 metres at 57th and Cambie. Water leaves Oakridge to the south and east, toward Marpole and the river.

No. Oakridge sits on the glacial upland, Vashon Drift till with sand and gravel lenses. The Fraser delta starts around the Oak Street Bridge, about thirteen blocks south of the neighbourhood’s southern edge. There is also no peat under here and no buried creek that anybody has been able to source.

Marpole, South Cambie, Kerrisdale and Sunset are the neighbours and we work in all of them, plus the rest of Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and the North Shore.