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.
Mayor Matthew Shoemaker said he’s voiced his disappointment with the federal government’s decision not to include Sault Ste. Marie in the new Canada Water Agency. Shoemaker was meeting with federal Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, during his recent visit to Sault Ste. Marie. Alghabra met with a number of stakeholders from area industries to discuss the federal government’s Green Energy Tax Credit program.
The couple is telling their story publicly for the first time — to warn others of the potential risk in buying shoreline property in Great Lakes communities, where the forces of erosion, fluctuating water levels and battering storms have been accelerated by climate change. Bousfield and Stumpf said once they discovered the house was at risk, they looked at options to remediate the collapsing bluff in order to save the house from being swallowed by the sparkling blue waters of Lake Huron. But what they found was a dizzying array of choices that ranged from $370,000 to well over $1 million. The solutions included everything from building a retaining wall, to dumping enough dirt over the bluff to hold it up, even spraying the entire bluff with a substance called shotcrete (basically, sprayed concrete), which is typically used keep the sheer face of open pit mines from collapsing.
