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.
Council has drowned a staff proposal for in-house water billing, following pleas from an EPCOR chief executive officer to stay the course and continue paying them to provide the billing service. EPCOR chief executive officer Susannah Robinson spoke on Monday (March 21) to ask council to consider not making a town-staff-recommended move to switch water and wastewater billing in-house, following a split committee vote earlier this month.
Jun Liu, P.Eng., has rejoined Tatham Engineering at its office in Collingwood, Ont., as group leader for the firm’s water and wastewater engineering department. Liu has more than 20 years’ experience and has contributed to water and wastewater projects across Ontario. He previously worked at Tatham from 2005 to 2007 as a project engineer. He continued in that role for the city of Barrie, then worked as a water and wastewater process engineer for the regional municipalities of Niagara and York. Most recently, he was a senior engineer with Indigenous Services Canada.
A pilot project currently underway in Collingwood is putting the contents of the town’s gutters under intense scrutiny. Five women spent a day last week meticulously sorting through the contents several buckets of garbage caught in waste traps installed in eight Collingwood storm drains. They were staff working for Georgian Bay Forever, which is the non-profit organization that brought Gutter Bins to Collingwood, along with a few other plastic/waste diversion initiatives aimed at keeping garbage and microplastics out of Georgian Bay.
