Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
People who want to protect the Atlantic salmon populations in Cape Breton say a small grant from the Nova Scotia government will have a big impact on their efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change in a local waterway. The Cheticamp River Salmon Association recently received $75,000 under the Sustainable Communities Challenge Fund to help build deflectors, which are piles of rock that narrow the river channel and make the water deeper.
A family of five in Howie Centre, N.S., has gone for months without clean water in their Cape Breton home after their well was contaminated by heating oil. They say officials from Nova Scotia's Environment Department confirmed a spill occurred on a neighbour's property earlier this year, but so far, little is being done about it and there are fears the oil has now spread to the nearby Sydney River.
Two Cape Breton community organizations and people with wells provincewide will benefit from new provincial funding that supports energy efficiency and groundwater research. Environment and Climate Change Minister Timothy Halman announced $1.3 million for three projects today, July 6, in Sydney: energy efficiency upgrades for the New Dawn Centre for Social Innovation in Sydney, heat pumps and removal of oil heating for Cape Breton Community Housing Association homes, and research in Cape Breton Regional Municipality and other communities on the impact of climate change on groundwater.
Few will forget post-tropical storm Fiona, battering the east coast last fall. From Cape Breton to Charlottetown, Halifax to Port aux Basques, Canadians were caught between downed power lines and trees, with harrowing stories of narrow escapes from the rising waters. Some homes were completely submerged, and carried out to sea. One woman in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, tragically lost her life this way.
Nadine Hunt's love for nature started early. As a child, she and her mother would often go to the beach near their home in Mabou, Cape Breton. "She taught me to respect the beach. If there was any litter or garbage around, we were picking it up," she said. Hunt said the area's unique natural environment and peaceful atmosphere are what makes it so special. "It's not just the beautiful beach and the warm water that we experience here in the summertime, but also the fact that you can always find a spot to be by yourself," she said.
A dispute is heating up between a Glace Bay fishing group and a Cape Breton non-profit environmental organization, and tying in a local MLA and the Cape Breton Regional Municipality over what’s being described as alleged toxicity in the water of a community dam. Donald McNeil, president of the Glace Bay-based #20 Dam Fishing Association, is claiming the water spilling through #20 Dam, located near a body of water that’s part of John Bernard Croak Memorial Park, contains “high levels of fecal coliform, a potentially dangerous bacteria, to both humans and animals,” based on a series of tests McNeil’s group conducted this past summer.
A half-century of dirty water is in the past for Cape Breton’s smallest Mi’kmaw community, but the fear and distrust remain, keeping some residents from drinking the water. A half-century of dirty water is in the past for Cape Breton’s smallest Mi’kmaw community, but the fear and distrust remain, keeping some residents from drinking the water. “I know a lot of people still don’t trust it – they’re still scared of it, and I don’t blame them. It’s been since 1972, 1974 that we’ve had ongoing problems with the water,” said long-time Potlotek chief, Wilbert Marshall. A new, state-of-the-art water treatment facility was built in 2019 aimed at eliminating the issues with excess iron and magnesium in the water supply.
When Patricia Paul saw her bathtub filling with cloudy, brown water, she decided she’d had enough. She took a photo of the scene: three inches of water so thick and dark, the bottom of the tub couldn’t be seen – a sharp contrast to the white plastic tub walls decorated with duck and turtle stickers for her young children. “It was almost black, and it smelled gross,” Paul remembers.
David Gabriel knows his beloved Baille Ard forest dodged a bullet when last week’s storm damaged, but didn’t destroy the south end Sydney trail system. “It’s saddening, but it’s not horrific,” said Gabriel, the frontman of the Baille Ard Recreation Association. “It’s not like we haven’t been through this before and won’t go through it again. We have our smallish group of volunteers, and we’re looking for a few more to help out, and we have some equipment, so given enough decent days we can patch it up before winter so people can continue to enjoy the trail.”
It could be "days or weeks" before things get back to normal in flood-ravaged parts of Cape Breton following the rain and wind storm that swept across Nova Scotia, according to a provincial transportation official. Jamie Chisholm, the Department of Transportation's eastern district director, said Wednesday the hardest hit areas were Inverness and Victoria counties. "We've had multiple bridges compromised, some washed out completely, several roads that are impassable right now," he said.
"A lot of it, we're going to find, I guess, more damage as the water recedes, because it's really hard to tell until the water recedes," he said. "It's probably easier to describe the number of roads that don't have problems than the ones that do." The Emergency Management Office is asking people in Inverness and Victoria counties to stay off the roads. Lyle Donovan, EMO co-ordinator in Victoria County, said more than a dozen roads are washed out and a man was injured when his car got stuck on one of the damaged roads.
A pilot project is looking at the possibility of growing kelp in Nova Scotia — part of a shift that industry representatives and researchers say could improve the health of the ocean and provide a more sustainable form of food production. The Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia is in the second year of a multi-year study looking into cultivating sugar kelp on shellfish leases in Cape Breton. The practice is sometimes referred to as restorative or regenerative aquaculture.
