Nicole Hancock
Indigenous community hosts full moon ceremony ...

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.

Indigenous community hosts full moon ceremony to heal Chedoke Creek

breached its banks

Moving beyond emissions: How Canada can weather the floods of the future

Moving beyond emissions: How Canada can weather the floods of the future

On Nov. 15, 2021, Kevin Vilac’s phone started ringing at 4 a.m. He was needed at work — urgently. The Coldwater River in B.C. had breached its banks and threatened to overwhelm the city of Merritt’s wastewater treatment plant. Vilac, the chief water operator for the city, rushed to the site to find the lower level of the plant inundated with water. “The worst flood I’d been through prior to this was the flood in 2018 from the Nicola River, and in comparison, it was nothing. It was a mere trickle compared to what we just went through,” he says.

First fires, now floods: Why B.C. is caught in a horrific dance between climate extremes

First fires, now floods: Why B.C. is caught in a horrific dance between climate extremes

As a month’s worth of rain poured down over 48 hours, the rushing Coldwater River was one of many that breached its muddy banks Monday and filled up the streets of surrounding communities in southern British Columbia as though they were part of a stoppered bathtub. There were RVs collapsed and half submerged by the water. There were school playgrounds, turned to pools. In Merritt, B.C., as she worked to help drag stuck cars and trucks, Carly Isaac sent photographs to the Star with a comment. “Global warming.” She and the town’s roughly 7,000 residents would later receive the order to flee to either Kamloops or Kelowna, each over an hour away.

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