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.
Water from the site of the Minto tire fire is still being collected and treated, more than two years after the fire burned for several days in the village. The Department of Environment and Local Government has previously told CBC News that a number of different contaminants have been found in monitoring wells, including "petroleum hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, metals, dioxins and furans," as well as the pollutant perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.
"Every one of these bodies of water are man-made — there's hardly any natural ones here," he said, adding that some of the ponds are more than 30 metres deep. Allison Enright, an assistant professor of aqueous and environmental geochemistry at the University of New Brunswick, has studied the water at the former coal-mining site. She said there are tiny sediment particles in the water, remains from the mining activity and invisible to the naked eye. "They tend to stay floating or suspended within the water of the lake, and then this interacts with the light on the surface and in the water body to give you this really bright blue colour," she explained. As for why some of the ponds are a different colour blue, Enright said it just depends how much sediment is in each body of water. Despite the peculiar hues, she said, it's not dangerous. "In this area, over several decades of efforts to remediate, the pH of this water has been made completely safe," she said.
