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.
Unquestionably, dumping more than 300 million litres of sewage-tinged water into the Ottawa River stinks. But it’s hard to imagine what that much sewage overflow actually does to a waterway. So, we asked the experts about the impact of the city’s decision to release that volume of water following the massive Aug. 10 storm—and what can be done to prevent this in the future.
David Price hates when it rains. "It's just anxiety and stress," said the Orléans man, who for the past eight years has seen his Harvest Crescent backyard fill up with water whenever there's a downpour. The issue has to do with a city-owned culvert behind Price's home that he says is spilling water into his yard. When he bought the house in 2014, it wasn't a huge problem — but Price said it's been getting worse each year since then.
A hot and muggy evening became a sudden monsoon in parts of southern Manitoba on Tuesday, with sideways rain, golf-ball-sized hail and flooding. "It was very sudden and unexpected. We all just got very soaked. It caught us all off guard," said Cori Bezan, who had headed out for dinner at the Winkler golf course as the clouds rolled in. "By the time we sat down to dinner, the temperature was just dropping and the wind was picking up and all of a sudden we could just see a sheet of rain advancing over the golf course."
Residents of Teulon, Man., are cleaning up and filing insurance claims six days after the Interlake town was inundated with water. Last week, rain came down in sheets in the town 60 kilometres north of Winnipeg, damaging roughly 800 homes — about 75 per cent of the community's residences, Mayor Anna Pazdzierski said. "There was one home, the water was halfway up the basement windows and just flowing in. The same level outside was the level inside," she said on Monday. "It just filled up everything it could fill up."
Prince George is the latest city to feel the lash of torrential downpours linked to ongoing unsettled weather across British Columbia. Environment Canada is reporting about six millimetres of rain fell at the Prince George airport Tuesday, but doesn't mention the localized, intense thunderstorm that deluged the city's downtown core, flooding several streets. RCMP said its frontline officers had to help after "several vehicles" got stranded in the water in the industrial area off Queensway and on Winnipeg Street. Four separate roads were closed as crews worked to clear the excess water.
The forecast may be improving in Minnedosa, but that doesn't mean people in the flooded southwestern Manitoba town can let their guards down just yet. "The big rain is behind us. Not time to get complacent, though," Jim Doppler, the town's chief administrative officer, told host Marcy Markusa on CBC's Information Radio Friday morning. People in Minnedosa were frantically sandbagging and pumping water throughout a downpour Thursday, as the Little Saskatchewan River inched higher.
