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 threat of flooding in a small N.W.T. community, perched on the bank of the South Nahanni River, is subsiding. After watching the river swell over the past week — quickly at first, and then more slowly — people living in Nahanni Butte noticed water levels drop an inch or two on Tuesday morning. About 24 hours later, Burton Campbell, one of the community's 93 residents, said it had gone down by eight inches.
The communities of Fort Liard and Nahanni Butte should be on high alert for possible flooding in the coming days, warns the Northwest Territories government. In a news release Wednesday, the territory said warm weather means the snowmelt from mountains in BC, Yukon and the N.W.T. is starting to make its way into the water system. That will contribute to high water levels and flow in the Liard and South Nahanni rivers.
Nestled between jagged mountain peaks in Nahanni National Park Reserve, N.W.T., the Bologna Glacier stores water and serves as a smooth transportation corridor for animals like caribou, porcupines and wolverines. But, like ice all over the world, it's melting and shrinking in the warming climate, leaving the future uncertain for creatures that travel across it and ecosystems that exist below it — including the South Nahanni River, to which its melt water flows.
