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.
If problems around water quality and wastewater in remote and poorly served communities are to be solved, they’ll need funding, local involvement and technical know-how. Caetano Dorea, a University of Victoria professor in civil engineering at UVic, is leading a team that has been awarded a $1.65-million Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant to train emerging engineers to work on water and sanitation projects in low-resource contexts in Canada and abroad.
