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.
"We have groundwater levels dropping dramatically. We have river levels that are very, very low," said Tom Pypker, chair of the department of natural resource sciences at Thompson Rivers University. "This has implications for farmers who need to extract water to irrigate their crops. This has implications for cities that need to draw water out of these surface water bodies to supply their population."
As Teck Resources hopes to expand its mountaintop-removal coal mining in British Columbia, water quality monitors in Canada and the United States warn the company’s existing mines already cause significant ecological damage. In 2019, the company’s research revealed that more than 90% of the cutthroat trout population had vanished in a 37-mile reach of the Upper Fording River near its mines around Sparwood, British Columbia. On March 26, Teck pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally discharging selenium and other pollutants into the watershed and paid a $60 million fine – the largest of its kind in Canadian history.
As Teck Resources hopes to expand its mountaintop-removal coal mining in British Columbia, water quality monitors in Canada and the United States warn the company’s existing mines already cause significant ecological damage. In 2019, the company’s own research revealed that more than 90% of the cutthroat trout population had vanished in a 60-kilometer (37-mile) reach of the Upper Fording River near its mines around Sparwood, British Columbia. On March 26, Teck pleaded guilty to two counts of illegally discharging selenium and other pollutants into the watershed and paid a $60 million fine — the largest of its kind in Canadian history.
