june
news

Some statistics

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Looking at the figures at the CRD’s Water Watch, the trend to less rain and more water use continues. The Sooke Lake Reservoir was at 91.3% full on June 8. The rainfall between September and May 31 was 91% of the average since 1914. Five-year average usage per day for May is 148.2 million litres per day.  For May 2025, the average usage per day was 163.1 million litres per day. 

Water Watch | Capital Regional District

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Drought conditions and wildfires in the Fort Nelson-Peace River area are unabated. CBC news quotes: Neal McLoughlin, superintendent of predictive services for the B.C. Wildfire Service, “We would need upwards of 150 millimetres of rain over the next three weeks to really make a dent in some of those high drought levels. We'd be looking at multiple days of 20 to 30 millimetres of rain, and we're just not seeing that in the outlook." 

 

Minister of Emergency Management Kelly Greene, “I'm asking everyone to have a plan in place now, before there's an emergency. Now is the time to make sure you have your grab-and-go bag ready for you and your family, including any pets."  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-wildfire-season-forecast-june-9-1.7556650

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Fog harvesting Tofino, Morocco and the Namib Desert 

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In Otter Point, we woke up silly early on June 5 due to being on slug patrol and were delighted to find the deck rails and grass were very damp and that there was a heavy fog in the air which stayed in the Strait all day. People complain about fog in summer or tease people living in the local “fog zone” but recall Tofino in 2021 and 2023 when the town suffered extreme shortages of rain. Fog helped save the town during the B.C. heat dome of 2021 and then in 2023, when the town of Tofino nearly ran out of water. 

 

Tofino Mayor Dan Law opened a town meeting by acknowledging and thanking the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations and protesters who defied court injunctions in the 1980s and stopped old-growth logging on Meares Island, where four creeks fill reservoirs and feed a sea-floor pipeline that supplies Tofino with water. The old growth trees are “fog catchers”. The trees help fill the creeks on Meares Island. You can see this effect along West Coast Road, where patches under the spruce trees are wet because fog condenses on the trees and drips down. 

 

Look up “fog catchers” to learn more about this phenomenon. This eight-minute video describes how The CloudFisher network in Morocco transformed lives by providing clean water. Worlds largest Fog-collector CloudFisher in Morocco – Producing drinking water from fog      

To see an older fog harvesting system check this one out: Desert Beetle Harvests Water — The Wonder of Science 

 

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Wildfires in the boreal forest 

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Only thanks to more rain on the west coast of Vancouver Island and the moisture from the sea air, we are not being driven by wildfires

from our homes, our communities and our ancestral lands. If we are careful and lucky, we will not experience what the people in northern B.C., Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are facing. On the evening of June 11, Squamish was facing an evacuation alert with wildfire within 40 metres of residences. [June 14, under control at 59.5 hectares, with evacuation alerts still in place.]

 

The northern hemisphere is ringed by the boreal forests. When the massive fire took out Fort McMurray and much of the boreal forest in that area in 2016, it was at one point predicted that the wildfires would only be stopped by Hudson Bay. People were wrong then but the fires are back, now destroying the same wilderness. Below is a link to the Natural Resources Canada map. If you click on the right side on Overlays, then on Active Fires, it brings up the current fires burning.   https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map

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Pollinators and water

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Taking short showers and turning off the tap are becoming habits for most people now, but we also need to save and use water in ways we may not notice.  Anyone old enough to be retired may remember family drives as kids and all the bugs smashed onto the windshields. Kids today won’t see that: there just aren’t as many insects. Not just bees, but many insects are pollinators. The insect population is much diminished, and all insects need our support.

 

For the bees, this summer, you can put out saucers of water. Thrift stores have inexpensive saucers: use saucers that are pale in colour and shallow – crockery, not metal as it gets too hot. It has to be very shallow water because, unlike wasps, bees cannot swim and will exhaust themselves before they drown.  Yes, these water saucers are also helpful on decks and balconies, not just in gardens. Yes, the shallow water does evaporate so the saucers need to be topped up regularly. 

 

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Wildfires and good news on Scotch broom 

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As we know, we have an abundance of invasive Scotch broom. There are several volunteer groups out cutting it while the pretty yellow flowers are in bloom because those flowers soon grow into seed pods which spray seeds and make even thicker, bigger broom patches. The patches are almost impenetrable and are high fire risk as broom is both dry and oily. Please help when and where you can to slow the spread of broom.

 

The good news is that a process to chip and blend broom with manure for a hot compost has been successful in the Highlands and Sooke. The resulting compost is beneficial as a mulch. Of interest to note: when we were researching this, the first reference to come was AI and the AI article claimed it does not work. Beware anything AI and check several references. Here is an article from the Victoria News, 2022. 

Before you take a load of broom to the Sooke works yard, check the 2025 policies. Chipped Scotch broom to help gardens grow in Sooke - Greater Victoria News 

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A sad water story

 

Recently we heard of an undetected leak that made the homeowners’ water bill very high.  They are on a city water system with meters to record water usage for purposes of billing. The leak was in their front yard, and they did fix it, when they found it, as it was their responsibility since it was on their side of the water meter.  We are wondering about how leaks could be detected before the over usage costs the homeowner for the wasted water. Also, how to limit waste in the water systems.

 

It seems most people do not monitor their water use, other than to perhaps call out to teens having a very long shower, etc. The water meter boxes belong to the service provider and the customers are not supposed to open them. There is no “water alarm” system built into the monitoring and to have a waterworks employee sitting watching for regular overuse would make the overall cost of the service prohibitively high.

 

With some research, we have found leak alarms (which detect water outside the lines, as in an early warning for a flooding basement) and flow-based alarms (which signal high or low water pressure) on the internet but nothing (so far) on “endless excess water flow”. It would make sense to have a meter in a home where the householder could regularly see the usage. It could be set so that an alarm would sound for lengthy excess flow. However, this would not warn of a “lawn leak”.  If anyone has any knowledge or ideas, we’d like to hear/read them. If you are creative, maybe you could patent one.

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Water testing

 

Mid or late summer when the groundwater can be stressed is a good time to have well water tested. When the water levels get lower and often usage increases, the stress from wells on the aquifer water can draw out more minerals from the soil, including arsenic which is found in this area. Also the warmer weather and ground temperature around water lines can lead to more breeding of coliform bacterium which is also undesirable.  A full test is not cheap but will let you know if you need to take steps to ensure your water is healthy. If you have not had your water tested in a few years, this might be something for your “to do” list.

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Groundwater depletion shifts earth’s axis

 

Scientists thought that the shift of earth’s axis was due to the melting of polar ice and glaciers but found this did not fully account for the four centimeters a year the north pole has shifted. From 1993 to 2010 people have extracted 2 trillion tons of underground water.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rampant-groundwater-pumping-has-changed-the-tilt-of-earths-axis/

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Wetlands

 

We did write in April that we would follow up more on the importance of wetlands and we neither fibbed nor forgot. In July, there is a Wetlands Workshop at Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary where experts are presenting their latest knowledge so to write on wetlands now would be pre-emptive and perhaps silly if the science has changed, which scientific knowledge does, as we learn more. It is a free event (value $250) put on by B C Wildlife Federation, the Bilston Watershed Habitat Protection Association and Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary. There may still be space in the workshop if you are interested in attending. 

https://www.cclmportal.ca/portal/wetland-knowledge/events/victoria-wetlandkeepers-workshop 

 

April’s newsletter was also all about beavers. Remember the beavers that built dams for the Czech government? Here’s just one of the many videos telling their story: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/--KS_82Wh00 

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BC Groundwater Wells and Aquifers new video:

 

We tend to scroll quite a number of water sites looking for the newest information and found this new video. Easy and informative- enjoy and share. Groundwater, Wells and Aquifers in BC Story Map (An Introduction to Groundwater Science)

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/16ccab4258a84c66ae47d94616240bb8