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.
OPG and Northland Power Inc have proposed a first-of-a-kind project for Canada that would develop a pumped storage project at a long inactive, open-pit iron ore mine. The Marmora Pumped Storage Project is a joint-venture between the two power producers. Located in the Municipality of Marmora and Lake in Ontario, the proposed 400MW closed-loop pumped storage facility could power up to 400,000 homes at peak demand with clean, renewable electricity for up to five hours.
Roughly forty years later, an account of the drilling activity by an elderly man who had worked on the well was published in the Ottawa Citizen. That article stated that the drilling had ceased after nine months at about the 1,800-foot mark when the well hit sulphur water. The well wasn’t a total failure, however. So strong was the water pressure that the sulphur water apparently came to the surface and continued to flow. A pipe was installed, with people coming far and wide to drink the water. Not only was sulphur water prized for its supposed medicinal value, it must have been of far better quality that the water the city piped in to residents from the grossly polluted Ottawa River.
On Oct. 20, 2018 the citizens of the Cowichan Valley voted for establishing the Drinking Water and Watershed Protection Service Establishment Bylaw (#4202). We thought that this bylaw would be used to protect our water supplies. It has been known for many years that the wells at three commercial establishments on Fisher Road, Cobble Hill had nitrate levels greatly exceeding the Health Canada Drinking Water Guidelines. These wells and surrounding CVRD monitoring wells have been monitored by a number of agencies, including the CVRD, in the past. The Cobble Hill Aquifer Interagency Task Group (CHAITG) was established to deal with this nitrate contamination and this Task Group commissioned Western Water Associates Ltd. (WWAL) to carry out a review of past studies. Surprisingly, this review did not review aquifer nitrite levels, only nitrate levels. Nitrite is a bigger concern than nitrate since nitrite can convert the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin to methemoglobin which does not carry oxygen. Thus, nitrite can cause tissue oxygen deficiency which is particularly problematical for infants and children since it can stunt their mental and physical growth.
