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.
Durham Region says the local water supply remains safe to drink despite “possible earthy or musty odours detected recently.” The region said in a post Thursday that changes to the smell or taste of the water typically occurs in the late summer or early fall, when Lake Ontario temperatures are higher. “Taste and odour episodes are caused by seasonal biological changes in Lake Ontario,” the region said.
When Barbara Sherwood Lollar sent water samples to a colleague at the University of Oxford for testing, she knew this was no ordinary water. The geochemist had spent much of her career wandering around some of the deepest mines in the world, finding and extracting water that was millions of years old. She waited and waited for results that should’ve come back promptly. So she dialled up the U.K. researcher in charge of the test. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the samples?’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Our mass spectrometer is broken. This can’t be right.’ ” The tests pegged the mean age of the samples, extracted from a mine north of Timmins, Ont., in 2009, at 1.6 billion years old—the oldest ever found on Earth.
Dawn Stewart said she’d never encountered the foul flavour of her home’s tap water until she filled up a glass a few weeks ago. “It was disgusting and I said ‘does it taste like there’s dirt in it?'” “I ran the water for a bit and it was worse — even when I’ve got soap in it, it still has that musty odour.” With no water filters in her Royal Oak home, Stewart said the water’s earthy flavour is a disincentive to drinking it. And initially, she wondered if consuming it posed a health risk.
