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.
Taralee Beardy never thought she would see her community get a safer source of water, but a national $8 billion drinking water class-action settlement affecting First Nations is set to change that. Beardy, the chief of Tataskweyak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, says the construction of a new 40-kilometre pipeline and water treatment plant for her community is set to begin next spring, meaning Tataskweyak's six-year boil water advisory will be coming to an end.
People in the northern Manitoba city of Thompson are being told to boil their water after routine testing revealed a failure in the filtration process. The failure has allowed poorly treated water to enter the distribution system, says a notice posted May 10 by Manitoba Health. Water must be boiled for at least one minute before using it for consumption, which includes drinking, making ice, preparing food or baby formula, washing vegetables and brushing teeth, the advisory says.
A Manitoba MLA says he wants to know why one of the busiest hospitals in northern Manitoba continues to deal with a lack of hot running water in some areas of the facility, and why the province isn’t showing more urgency and doing more to get the problem fixed. “It’s unthinkable that a large hospital like Thompson would be left without hot water for any length of time,” Flin Flon NDP MLA Tom Lindsey said last week while speaking in the Manitoba Legislature.
The province of Manitoba says it hopes to improve access to timely testing of water quality samples in northern Manitoba through a pilot program announced Thursday. A bacteriological water testing in site in Thompson is expected to reduce delays and uncertainties associated with shipping water samples from the northern Indigenous communities of Pikwitonei, Thicket Portage and Nelson House, according to a provincial news release.
This time of year, with the temperature plunging below -20 C, a snowmobile and an ice chisel are required tools for anyone in Tataskweyak Cree Nation in need of fresh water. There’s the bottled stuff, trucked into town courtesy of the federal government, but the weekly shipment of 1,500 cases is only sufficient to meet basic consumption needs. For cleaning, cooking and basic hygiene water, many residents need a supplementary source. And rather than use their tainted tap water, they follow a snowmobile trail several kilometres to Assean Lake, pails in hand.
