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.
In 2020, the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation stopped filling the ponds with potable water in a bid to conserve water, implementing a bylaw that requires some water features, like ponds that do not recirculate water, be switched off. Now many ponds throughout the city are drying up or have completely dried up — to the disappointment of some residents, like Seear. The park board said it is focusing instead on restarting a handful of fountains it previously closed to save water.
Contractors have been deployed to Sudbury's Ramsey Lake to clean up a residential oil spill that migrated to the shoreline on Jan. 17. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks estimates around 812 litres of home heating fuel spilled onto the ground from a storage tank at a property on Gennings Street, near the lake. While Ramsey Lake is the main source of the city's drinking water, ministry spokesperson Gary Wheeler said there is only a low risk to the thousands of people who get their municipal drinking water from the lake.
I’ve heard on more than one occasion someone “dad joke” about denial not just being a river in Egypt. Online you’ll find this quote attributed, without further detail, to Mark Twain. However, the earliest evidence of its use, according to Quote Investigator, was in a 1933 U.S. newspaper – 23 years after Twain died. It’s interesting, though not surprising, how the unverified attribution presented as fact is clearly more prevalent on the Internet.
World Water Day, annually observed by the United Nations on March 22, celebrates water and raises awareness to the billions of people living without access to safe water. This year’s theme is groundwater: making the invisible visible. But what are the current and future challenges facing this natural resource in Canada? University of Waterloo’s Earth and environmental sciences professor and groundwater expert David Rudolph answers this and other questions.
In the summer, the Sylvia Grinnell River near Iqaluit is a popular spot to fish for Arctic char where ice-cold water cascades over rocky ledges. Now, with thick layers of ice and snow covering the flowing water below, it has become one of the city's main water sources for drinking and cooking. The other comes in thousands of plastic water bottles that arrive by plane.
