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.
The Wheatley River Improvement Group (WRIG) finished 14 weeks of fieldwork, enhancing and mitigating Wheatley River. During the weeks of fieldwork, WRIG staff planted or donated more than 650 native tree and shrub species. The team also planted around 500 live cuttings from red-osier dogwood shrubs directly into stream banks in areas prone to erosion.
“We started hearing a noise, like breaking, or coins falling,” says Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He makes a loud, sustained crunching sound, recreating what he and his team heard, years earlier while doing fieldwork on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Below the surface of the ice near where they were standing, a flood had begun. “The water below starts to move, but you still have snow on top,” Tedesco says of the phenomenon. As the flowing water gains momentum, overlying snow and ice give way and reveal a meltwater stream or river.
