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.
The Nova Scotia government wants to acquire one of the province's two most contaminated historical gold mines so it can clean it up. The Goldenville site, located near Sherbrooke on the Eastern Shore, was the most productive of Nova Scotia's 64 historical gold mine districts. It was mined from 1862 to 1941 and included as many as 19 different open pit and underground mines.
The Nova Scotia government is taking its first steps toward cleaning up five more sites in the province that were contaminated by historical mining — Gold Brook Lake, Seal Harbour, Lake Enon, Mooseland mine and the former steel plant on Ocean Street in Sydney Mines. Nova Scotia Lands, the provincial Crown corporation responsible for remediation of Crown properties, posted notices last month seeking companies to study the five sites and come up with remediation options for each.
Researchers from three Maritime universities are hoping microbes collected from the bottom of a lake near an abandoned gold mine in Dartmouth, N.S., will provide a model for how to clean up contaminated sites across the province in a quicker and less-intrusive way. Last May, a research team took a boat to the middle of Lake Charles, not far from the former Montague gold mine, where extensive mining took place from 1860 to about 1940.
