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.
It’s an area of farmland Ryan Maurer says is worth as much as a Lamborghini. High run-off flooded one of his fields in spring 2022, leaving shallow pools of water. This was before the farmer opened ditches to drain it. “Would you take your Lamborghini and park it in a slough?” Maurer asked on his farm near Grenfell, Sask., about 125 kilometres east of Regina.
Brent Fry, who farms grain and livestock, said it's common for his land to flood for three days when people upstream get 50 millimetres of rain. He said it has caused roads and access points to erode. "There are about four farms out there and all they're doing is draining whether they've got permission or not," Fry said. "I don't even know what to do because the government's not doing anything — they're siding with the big guys."
Flooding in B.C.'s Interior has destroyed one home and forced several others to be evacuated, according to the local fire chief. Evacuation orders are now in place for five properties — including the local firehall — in the Village of Cache Creek, B.C., where a local state of emergency was declared on May 1 as the nearby creek and river threatened homes in the area and posed an "imminent threat to people and property."
Residents of several properties in B.C.'s North Okanagan were ordered to evacuate their homes as a nearby creek overflowed Tuesday. Officials say they're concerned about the flood risk associated with Whiteman's Creek, close to where it empties into Okanagan Lake about 70 kilometres north of Kelowna, B.C. According to the Okanagan Indian Band, which issued the evacuation order, residents on the south side of Falcon Avenue, adjacent to Whiteman's Creek, must leave their properties immediately. This includes people living at addresses 161 to 195 Falcon Avenue, as well as Nos. 54 and 55.
If you bring home a report card with grades like D, C-, B, and in some spots D and F you know you would have some explaining to do. The Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (NPCA) recently released the 2023 Watershed Report Card, a checkup on the health of the Niagara Peninsula watershed, focusing on surface and groundwater quality, forest conditions, and watershed features.
Swift Current, Sask., has been experiencing flooding over the last few days due to the spring melt, so much so that the city called an official state of emergency at 5 p.m. CST Tuesday night. As of 4 p.m. CST Wednesday, the city remained under that state of emergency, as water levels continued to be high. The city said the decision to declare the emergency was meant as a proactive measure, as there is the potential of increased spring water run-off. The city said the source of the flooding is the Swift Current Creek.
There's been another partial closure on Yukon highways Monday – the North Klondike Highway near Horse Creek Road is down to one lane traffic after flooded that part of the highway. Resident Darren Holcombe said he was passing through the area when he saw a few cars stopped. Then, he said he saw water flooding onto the road. "The water is pouring across the road, kind of eating away around the culvert where all the gravel is," he said.
Four years after an incident that killed 76 cutthroat trout in a West Vancouver stream, a contractor that was working for the Ministry of Transportation is facing charges under the Federal Fisheries Act. Keller Foundations Ltd. has been charged with two counts of depositing a deleterious substance in connection to the April 30, 2018, fish deaths. John Barker was president of West Vancouver Streamkeepers at the time, which helps develop and maintain best practices for protecting stream habitat. He said he was shocked to see the dead fish littering the banks of Larson Creek, near Gleneagles Golf Course.
The Alberta Energy Regulator has laid charges against Tidewater Midstream and Infrastructure Ltd. for a release of acidic water in west-central Alberta. The regulator says the release occurred in Oct. 2019 at Tidewater’s Ram River sour gas processing plant near Rocky Mountain House. It says the acidic water flowed into a nearby creek. Calgary-based Tidewater has been charged with 10 violations under the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, including releasing a substance to the environment that caused or may have caused an adverse effect.
One of the bigger infrastructure projects scheduled for 2021 in Pincher Creek is replacing the storm drainage system along Church Avenue, Willow Street and Poplar Avenue. As part of the 2021 capital budget, $377,042.20 will be used to begin replacing the old storm sewer. Pincher Creek’s drainage system is also getting a legal boost after council approved all three readings for a new storm drainage bylaw, Bylaw 1630-21. Among other things, the bylaw lays out what can and cannot be released into storm drains.
Alberta government documents show repeated cuts to environmental monitoring despite contaminants in some waterways that exceed thresholds that are supposed to trigger increased scrutiny. The province's 2019 five-year monitoring plan shows stations on two rivers and a creek polluted with selenium from coal mines were mothballed. That was despite more than two decades of readings that Alberta Environment guidelines suggest should have led to closer attention.
Less than two months after a spill at an oil pipeline dumped 900,000 litres of contaminated water–so called “produced water”–in northwestern Alberta, there’s been another spill in the oil-rich province. The latest spill, reported at 2 p.m on Christmas Day by a local landowner, occurred near Drayton Valley, a community about 130 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, the province’s capital city. Drayton Valley was the site of a spill–the result of a ruptured pipeline–that dumped 40,000 litres of crude oil into a local creek in August, 2019.
