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.
Federal, provincial and municipal governments have come together in eastern P.E.I. for a major expansion of the water and sewer system. The $4.7-million project will extend the system about 2.5 kilometres from the old border of Montague into the old community of Brudenell up to MacDonald Road. The amalgamation of a group of communities to create Three Rivers in 2018 was key to getting the project off the ground, said Mayor Ed MacAulay.
A conservation authority is working to update flood hazard maps for parts of eastern Ontario, which will help municipal governments assess the risk of flooding when planning for the future. The South Nation Conservation (SNC), an organization dedicated to the protection and restoration of ecosystems in the region, is leading the efforts to update the maps, which hasn't been done for many years.
Snaking beneath Regina's streets are 600 kilometres of water mains built with asbestos-cement. That's about 60 per cent of some 1,000 kilometres of the mains that deliver water to homes around the city. Increasingly, some scientists and communities are questioning the wisdom in having drinking water flowing through pipes constructed from asbestos fibres.
In Canada's largest city, raw sewage flows into Lake Ontario so often, Toronto tells people they should never swim off the city's beaches for least two days after it rains. Across the country in Mission, B.C., a three-decade-old pipe that carries sewage under the Fraser River to a treatment plant in Abbotsford is so loaded operators can't even slip a camera inside it to look for damage. If that pipe bursts, it will dump 11 million litres of putrid water from area homes and businesses into a critical salmon habitat every day it isn't fixed.
