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ABBOTSFORD - The owner of Loewen Acres, ground zero in last year's outbreak of avian flu in the Fraser Valley, said Wednesday he remains "appalled and sickened" at the way the Canadian Food Inspection Agency handled the crisis.

In his first public accounting of events, Dave Loewen said he consistently adopted high bio-security standards at his Matsqui Prairie farm after getting into the poultry business in 1999, but complained that federal officials responsible for stopping the spread of the flu did not perform as well.

Loewen told a parliamentary standing committee on agriculture that CFIA officials left ground chicken fat and feathers on his driveway even after they lifted the quarantine on his 22-hectare property on Feb. 23. Twice he had to call them to have the driveway cleaned and disinfected.

He also complained that the news media should not have been allowed to congregate at the end of his driveway, noting one TV crew with a satellite dish actually drove onto his chicken farm and had to be chased down by CFIA officials, who immediately disinfected the tires.

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CFIA officials euthanized 18,000 birds on the Loewen property, according to a joint submission to the committee by two farmers and two vets, including Loewen and Bowes.

About 3,500 kilograms of chicken carcasses were ground up with 1,000 kilograms of barn litter per load; each of the 15 mixed loads was transported 400 metres along a public road to Loewen's residential driveway where the contents were dumped directly on to the paved drive.

This material was then pushed with a front-end loader into an open dairy feed bunker for composting. "The owner and attending CFIA veterinarian both commented that there were strong winds originating from the north," the submission states.

By 5 a.m. on Feb. 22, the bunker had reached capacity at 10,000 birds, and the remaining material was placed inside plastic-lined cardboard totes for transport to a Princeton incinerator. One day later, CFIA lifted the quarantine on the farm "despite the presence of a large quantity of composting infected carcasses."

On Mar. 6, two weeks after the cull at the Loewen farm, avian flu was diagnosed by the B.C. government lab at a second broiler operation, Fraserbridge Farms, 1.5 kilometres away.

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