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."
The flooding in southern British Columbia will be the largest natural catastrophic disaster for the insurance industry in 2021, says Marcos Alvarez, DBRS Morningstar’s head of insurance. Insurance companies have not yet been able to provide estimates of what the total cost of damages for the B.C. flooding could tally up to, but Mr. Alvarez said in the past 10 years Canada has had several flood events across the country that each surpassed $1-billion in insurance claims. “Increases in average annual insured weather-related losses are higher in Canada than at the global level,” Mr. Alvarez said. “This is consistent with the notion that the warming of Canada’s climate is happening at about twice the rate of the global average.”
