- ARESST MEMBERS: HAVE YOUR SAY ON CRD'S REGIONAL SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY (RSS)!!
- FLOODING CLOSES GREATER VICTORIA ROADS AND SPILLS SEWAGE FROM OCEAN OUTFALL POINTS
- SALMON STOCK COLLAPSE NOT CAUSED BY SEA LICE, STUDY SAYS
- Are we doing enough?
So jump in!
- Explore the policy briefs through the boxes below
- Answer any or all of our questions
- Let us know what shape you think the CRD should take over the next quarter century.
--------------------------------
Colwood hopes its residents will get on board with its latest plans to sort out its sewer woes.
Municipal engineer Michael Baxter will outline the plan at a special meeting at Colwood municipal hall tonight.
Essentially, the idea is to merge and enlarge the municipality's local service areas, change the way sewer taxes are calculated to a parcel tax instead of as a portion of property taxes and reduce the existing fees for sewer connections. Under the plan, 56 areas would be reduced to six.
"What that does is bring the tax more in line with what was originally in the minds of the developers and the city when they set this thing up in the first place," Baxter said.
"At the same time, it makes the tax fairer and more stable."
Just about everyone involved with Colwood's sewer system, including the municipality, acknowledges that it's a mess. Municipally financed with borrowed money, the trunk system was built in phases, each created and financed independently.
That has led to a system that has neighbours paying different amounts for the same service. Some pay nothing at all.
"We got to a point where neighbours using the same service can be paying vastly different tax rates and that's fundamentally illegal. People are supposed to be paying the same tax rates for the same service. Now that's not necessarily the same tax, but the same tax rate," Baxter said.
He said there are some homeowners who might have paid $2,000 in sewer taxes last year whose bill would drop to about $550 if this is adopted.
There are areas of the municipality where a homeowner would have to pay more than $25,000 up front to get hooked up to a sewer. It's hoped that by spreading those costs through a wider area, such costs could be reduced to about $7,000.
It also means owners with undeveloped properties will be charged more.
Currently, land that has nothing built on it has a low assessed value, so its sewer rate is relatively low. If the parcel tax is adopted, vacant land would be charged based on its potential to hold the amount of residences its zoning permits.
The municipality is looking for input from residents before taking the plan to the province for ratification. Baxter said the municipality wants the province to sign off on the plan through a legislative order.
The meeting takes place at 7 p.m. at Colwood City Hall, 3300 Wishart Rd. The presentation will be posted afterward on the municipal website, www.colwood.ca.
bcleverley@timescolonist.com
------------------------
- FLOODING CLOSES GREATER VICTORIA ROADS AND SPILLS SEWAGE FROM OCEAN OUTFALL POINTS
- SALMON STOCK COLLAPSE NOT CAUSED BY SEA LICE, STUDY SAYS
- COLWOOD SEWAGE PLAN ON TAP TONIGHT (tidy up a legacy mess to get ready for future mess?)
------------------------------
ARESST members: This may be your opportunity to tell the CRD that our current marine-based sewage treatment system is a
------------------------------
ARESST MEMBERS: HAVE YOUR SAY ON CRD'S REGIONAL SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY (RSS)!!
ARESST members: This may be your opportunity to tell the CRD that our current marine-based sewage treatment system is a
more sustainable system than the sludge-and-greenhouse gas creating, economically wasteful, land-based project.
From the CRD's RSS website:
The RSS process has now entered its newest engagement phase, which will continue until early Spring of 2011. Feedback will be gathered through the Sustainability Portal, each policy paper has a set of questions to help provide their response. Feedback will also be collected through meeting notes of stakeholder events, committee and council meetings and through written submissions made by interested parties.
The results of these consultations along with models of future policy scenarios will be prepared for a Forum of Councils. At the Council Forum, to be held in early Spring 2011, further conversations will take place with regard to the direction and shape of the policies. The results will form the basis for the RSS, which will be drafted over the course of 2011, with additional public engagement on the new draft itself. To help things along, the CRD has produced nine policy briefs, each with its own set of policy options. We want to know what you think - you can submit your input online for each of the nine policy briefs.
The results of these consultations along with models of future policy scenarios will be prepared for a Forum of Councils. At the Council Forum, to be held in early Spring 2011, further conversations will take place with regard to the direction and shape of the policies. The results will form the basis for the RSS, which will be drafted over the course of 2011, with additional public engagement on the new draft itself. To help things along, the CRD has produced nine policy briefs, each with its own set of policy options. We want to know what you think - you can submit your input online for each of the nine policy briefs.
- Are we doing enough?
- Should we do more?
- Since not all topics can be a top priority, where should the trade-offs take place?
So jump in!- Explore the policy briefs through the boxes below
- Answer any or all of our questions
- Let us know what shape you think the CRD should take over the next quarter century.
- ARESST members: As you see, all of those 9 areas could be impacted negatively by going to the land-based sewage treatment plant, so let the CRD know what you think of it!
--------------------------------
ARESST: Later version of published story below, OUTFALL in title revised to be OUTFLOW.
FLOODING CLOSES GREATER VICTORIA ROADS AND SPILLS SEWAGE FROM OCEAN OUTFALL POINTS
Sarah Petrescu,
Times Colonist
December 12, 2010 1:23 PM
Heavy rainfall overnight and this morning is wreaking havoc on Island roads, homes and our sewer systems.
Flooding has closed West Coast Road (Highway 14), between Grant Road and Kemp Lake Road. There is a detour along Otter Point Road, according to Mainroad South Island Contracting.
Sooke Road at West Coast Tire (4730 Sooke Road) is also flooded, according to reports. Traffic is moving by a single, alternating, lane.
Times Colonist reader Shawn Merrill said it is the worst stretch of road on his drive from Patricia Bay to Sooke this morning.
“There’s about one-and-a-half feet of moving water in the westbound lane, and one foot in the east bound lane and it’s getting higher,” he wrote in an e-mail. Merrill said there is one police cruiser one scene but traffic is almost at a stand still.
“I barely made it through with my SUV and I ended up pushing a wave of water toward another vehicle.”
Other roads with flooding include Blenkinsop, Interurban and Old Field.
Victoria Police are warning drivers to be cautious as extreme water-pooling on roads can cause a vehicle to hydroplane and lose control, said staff sergeant Keith Linder.
The Capital Region District issued a warning about the health risk of stormwater overflow on the eastern shoreline of Greater Victoria. Stormwater is causing sewage to overflow and seep into the ocean at several outflow points.
Residents are advised to avoid swimming or wading in the water as it might contain unsanitary human waste and pose health risks
“Heavily diluted sewage overflows are being caused by long duration, heavy rains, challenging the region’s sewer infrastructure,” said Ted Robbins, senior manager of CRD water management in a release.
Sewer design accounts for some infiltration of rain and groundwater. The eastern shoreline of Victoria particularly prone to in ‘inflow and infiltration’ because of its older sewer collection system infrastructure, said the release.
The affected outfall area runs from Finnerty Point, near Queenswood, to Clover Point, on Dallas Road.
Homes in the region are also being taxed by the volume of water coming down. Kyle Topelko, from Plumb-Perfect Plumbing and Drainage Services, said he’s had more than 40 calls regarding flooding basements.
Environment Canada has a heavy rainfall warning in effect for Vancouver Island. 20 to 50 mm of rain were expected overnight as a tropical feed moves over southern British Columbia.
spetrescu@timescolonist.com
http://www.vancouversun.com/
------------------------------
ARESST: Quote from story below, about public resources and science:
An infestation of sea lice from farmed salmon was not responsible for the 2002 collapse of wild pink salmon stocks around the Broughton Archipelago, according to the conclusions of a new scientific study.
The study, by veterinary pathologists Gary Marty and Sonja Saksida, with data analysis by Terrence Quinn, from the University of Alaska, contradicts a 2007 study that noted lower wild-salmon survival rates in B.C. rivers close to salmon farms, and zeroed in on sea lice as the cause.
However, while Marty, Saksida and Quinn study concluded that salmon farms are the main source of transmission for sea lice to juvenile pink salmon heading out to sea, it wasn’t sea lice that killed off massive numbers of juvenile pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago leading to a 97-per-cent collapse of the 2002 spawning run.
The researchers examined farm stocking and health records for 26 farm sites in the Broughton Archipelago and pink-salmon returns for rivers around the region, but could not find a correlation between the numbers of sea lice juvenile salmon are exposed to and pink-salmon survival.
In their work, Marty said they discovered that the region’s near record 2001 return was exposed to even higher numbers of sea lice as juveniles while passing the Broughton farms on their outward migration than the 2002-generation of fish.
“Just those two information [points] tell us that something other than sea lice must have killed those fish in 2002,” Marty, a veterinary pathologist and research associate with the University of California, Davis said in a conference call.
The researchers’ results, produced for the University of California, Davis and to be published this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may prove controversial in the environmental community.
The 2007 study, whose authors included University of Alberta researcher Martin Krkosek and B.C.'s Alexandra Morton, found sea-lice infestation levels on migrating pink salmon around the Broughton farms that were 70 times higher than on fish that were not migrating past salmon farms.
Their results, published in the journal Science, is one of the pieces of evidence environmentalists have relied on to argue that salmon farms should be moved from open net-pen operations in the ocean to closed-containment systems on land.
However, in their paper, Marty and Saksida argue that their data “do not support the hypothesis that separating farm fish from wild fish will increase pink salmon survival.”
Marty said that the issue of sea lice threatening wild pink salmon, possibly leading to their extinction, has been discussed for the past 10 years.
“We’ve seen millions of tax dollars and non-profit donations spend studying sea lice, and there are proposals on the table to spend millions more on moving fish farms out of the ocean into closed-containment systems,” Marty said.
“We need to ask the question, is this a good use of public resources? Are we confident in the science supporting this move?”
In their study, Marty and Saksida noted that previous studies of sea-lice impacts on wild fish did not include examinations for other possible causes of disease in the affected juvenile pinks.
In other words, Marty said the work did not determine if it was the sea lice killing the fish, or if lice were attracted to diseased fish that were going to die for another reason.
Marty said controlled experiments that introduce sea lice to juvenile pink salmon have been unable to show that lice infestations kill off enough healthy fish to result in population crashes.
However, Marty said that the observations of Morton and other researchers that noted bleeding in the fins of the lice-infested fish offers a clue as to what might have been the problem.
“From our medical perspective, when we see that kind of change, we think it could be some kind of bacterial or viral infection,” Marty said.
But there was no bacteriology, virology or histopathology work done to determine what the cause of that bleeding might have been.
Marty said there are still questions that need to be answered about what is causing the decline of pink salmon in the region and he wants to follow up with work that examines migrating fish so that scientists can develop a medical history of their health.
Marty added that he participated in a study on pink salmon in 2007 and 2008 that showed very few fish impacted by sea lice, but 30 per cent appeared to have had exposure to a toxin.
“We’d suggest spending more time looking at what killed 30 per cent of the fish, and maybe you don’t need to spend as much time on what killed two fish.”
Marty is a researcher in the in the department of anatomy, physiology and cell biology in the University of California, Davis’ school of veterinary medicine and Saksida is a veterinary pathologist with the Campbell-River-based Centre for Aquatic Health Science.
http://www.timescolonist.com/health/2002+salmon+stock+collapse+caused+lice+study+says/3970745/story.html
COLWOOD SEWAGE PLAN ON TAP TONIGHT (14 DEC)
Bill Cleverley
Times Colonist
December 14, 2010
FLOODING CLOSES GREATER VICTORIA ROADS AND SPILLS SEWAGE FROM OCEAN OUTFALL POINTS
Sarah Petrescu,
Times Colonist
December 12, 2010 1:23 PM
Heavy rainfall overnight and this morning is wreaking havoc on Island roads, homes and our sewer systems.
Flooding has closed West Coast Road (Highway 14), between Grant Road and Kemp Lake Road. There is a detour along Otter Point Road, according to Mainroad South Island Contracting.
Sooke Road at West Coast Tire (4730 Sooke Road) is also flooded, according to reports. Traffic is moving by a single, alternating, lane.
Times Colonist reader Shawn Merrill said it is the worst stretch of road on his drive from Patricia Bay to Sooke this morning.
“There’s about one-and-a-half feet of moving water in the westbound lane, and one foot in the east bound lane and it’s getting higher,” he wrote in an e-mail. Merrill said there is one police cruiser one scene but traffic is almost at a stand still.
“I barely made it through with my SUV and I ended up pushing a wave of water toward another vehicle.”
Other roads with flooding include Blenkinsop, Interurban and Old Field.
Victoria Police are warning drivers to be cautious as extreme water-pooling on roads can cause a vehicle to hydroplane and lose control, said staff sergeant Keith Linder.
The Capital Region District issued a warning about the health risk of stormwater overflow on the eastern shoreline of Greater Victoria. Stormwater is causing sewage to overflow and seep into the ocean at several outflow points.
Residents are advised to avoid swimming or wading in the water as it might contain unsanitary human waste and pose health risks
“Heavily diluted sewage overflows are being caused by long duration, heavy rains, challenging the region’s sewer infrastructure,” said Ted Robbins, senior manager of CRD water management in a release.
Sewer design accounts for some infiltration of rain and groundwater. The eastern shoreline of Victoria particularly prone to in ‘inflow and infiltration’ because of its older sewer collection system infrastructure, said the release.
The affected outfall area runs from Finnerty Point, near Queenswood, to Clover Point, on Dallas Road.
Homes in the region are also being taxed by the volume of water coming down. Kyle Topelko, from Plumb-Perfect Plumbing and Drainage Services, said he’s had more than 40 calls regarding flooding basements.
Environment Canada has a heavy rainfall warning in effect for Vancouver Island. 20 to 50 mm of rain were expected overnight as a tropical feed moves over southern British Columbia.
spetrescu@timescolonist.com
http://www.vancouversun.com/
------------------------------
ARESST: Quote from story below, about public resources and science:
“We’ve seen millions of tax dollars and non-profit donations spend studying sea lice, and there are proposals on the table to spend millions more on moving fish farms out of the ocean into closed-containment systems,” Marty said. "We need to ask the question, is this a good use of public resources? Are we confident in the science supporting this move?”
SALMON STOCK COLLAPSE NOT CAUSED BY SEA LICE, STUDY SAYS
2002 salmon stock collapse not caused by sea lice, study says
Contradicts 2007 study on the 97-per-cent collapse of 2002 spawning run
Derrick Penner,
Victoria Times Colonist
December 13, 2010
Your letters to: letters@timescolonist.com
SALMON STOCK COLLAPSE NOT CAUSED BY SEA LICE, STUDY SAYS
2002 salmon stock collapse not caused by sea lice, study says
Contradicts 2007 study on the 97-per-cent collapse of 2002 spawning run
Derrick Penner,
Victoria Times Colonist
December 13, 2010
Your letters to: letters@timescolonist.com
An infestation of sea lice from farmed salmon was not responsible for the 2002 collapse of wild pink salmon stocks around the Broughton Archipelago, according to the conclusions of a new scientific study.
The study, by veterinary pathologists Gary Marty and Sonja Saksida, with data analysis by Terrence Quinn, from the University of Alaska, contradicts a 2007 study that noted lower wild-salmon survival rates in B.C. rivers close to salmon farms, and zeroed in on sea lice as the cause.
However, while Marty, Saksida and Quinn study concluded that salmon farms are the main source of transmission for sea lice to juvenile pink salmon heading out to sea, it wasn’t sea lice that killed off massive numbers of juvenile pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago leading to a 97-per-cent collapse of the 2002 spawning run.
The researchers examined farm stocking and health records for 26 farm sites in the Broughton Archipelago and pink-salmon returns for rivers around the region, but could not find a correlation between the numbers of sea lice juvenile salmon are exposed to and pink-salmon survival.
In their work, Marty said they discovered that the region’s near record 2001 return was exposed to even higher numbers of sea lice as juveniles while passing the Broughton farms on their outward migration than the 2002-generation of fish.
“Just those two information [points] tell us that something other than sea lice must have killed those fish in 2002,” Marty, a veterinary pathologist and research associate with the University of California, Davis said in a conference call.
The researchers’ results, produced for the University of California, Davis and to be published this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may prove controversial in the environmental community.
The 2007 study, whose authors included University of Alberta researcher Martin Krkosek and B.C.'s Alexandra Morton, found sea-lice infestation levels on migrating pink salmon around the Broughton farms that were 70 times higher than on fish that were not migrating past salmon farms.
Their results, published in the journal Science, is one of the pieces of evidence environmentalists have relied on to argue that salmon farms should be moved from open net-pen operations in the ocean to closed-containment systems on land.
However, in their paper, Marty and Saksida argue that their data “do not support the hypothesis that separating farm fish from wild fish will increase pink salmon survival.”
Marty said that the issue of sea lice threatening wild pink salmon, possibly leading to their extinction, has been discussed for the past 10 years.
“We’ve seen millions of tax dollars and non-profit donations spend studying sea lice, and there are proposals on the table to spend millions more on moving fish farms out of the ocean into closed-containment systems,” Marty said.
“We need to ask the question, is this a good use of public resources? Are we confident in the science supporting this move?”
In their study, Marty and Saksida noted that previous studies of sea-lice impacts on wild fish did not include examinations for other possible causes of disease in the affected juvenile pinks.
In other words, Marty said the work did not determine if it was the sea lice killing the fish, or if lice were attracted to diseased fish that were going to die for another reason.
Marty said controlled experiments that introduce sea lice to juvenile pink salmon have been unable to show that lice infestations kill off enough healthy fish to result in population crashes.
However, Marty said that the observations of Morton and other researchers that noted bleeding in the fins of the lice-infested fish offers a clue as to what might have been the problem.
“From our medical perspective, when we see that kind of change, we think it could be some kind of bacterial or viral infection,” Marty said.
But there was no bacteriology, virology or histopathology work done to determine what the cause of that bleeding might have been.
Marty said there are still questions that need to be answered about what is causing the decline of pink salmon in the region and he wants to follow up with work that examines migrating fish so that scientists can develop a medical history of their health.
Marty added that he participated in a study on pink salmon in 2007 and 2008 that showed very few fish impacted by sea lice, but 30 per cent appeared to have had exposure to a toxin.
“We’d suggest spending more time looking at what killed 30 per cent of the fish, and maybe you don’t need to spend as much time on what killed two fish.”
Marty is a researcher in the in the department of anatomy, physiology and cell biology in the University of California, Davis’ school of veterinary medicine and Saksida is a veterinary pathologist with the Campbell-River-based Centre for Aquatic Health Science.
http://www.timescolonist.com/health/2002+salmon+stock+collapse+caused+lice+study+says/3970745/story.html
------------------------------
COLWOOD SEWAGE PLAN ON TAP TONIGHT (14 DEC)
Bill Cleverley
Times Colonist
December 14, 2010
Your letters to: letters@timescolonist.com
Colwood hopes its residents will get on board with its latest plans to sort out its sewer woes.
Municipal engineer Michael Baxter will outline the plan at a special meeting at Colwood municipal hall tonight.
Essentially, the idea is to merge and enlarge the municipality's local service areas, change the way sewer taxes are calculated to a parcel tax instead of as a portion of property taxes and reduce the existing fees for sewer connections. Under the plan, 56 areas would be reduced to six.
"What that does is bring the tax more in line with what was originally in the minds of the developers and the city when they set this thing up in the first place," Baxter said.
"At the same time, it makes the tax fairer and more stable."
Just about everyone involved with Colwood's sewer system, including the municipality, acknowledges that it's a mess. Municipally financed with borrowed money, the trunk system was built in phases, each created and financed independently.
That has led to a system that has neighbours paying different amounts for the same service. Some pay nothing at all.
"We got to a point where neighbours using the same service can be paying vastly different tax rates and that's fundamentally illegal. People are supposed to be paying the same tax rates for the same service. Now that's not necessarily the same tax, but the same tax rate," Baxter said.
He said there are some homeowners who might have paid $2,000 in sewer taxes last year whose bill would drop to about $550 if this is adopted.
There are areas of the municipality where a homeowner would have to pay more than $25,000 up front to get hooked up to a sewer. It's hoped that by spreading those costs through a wider area, such costs could be reduced to about $7,000.
It also means owners with undeveloped properties will be charged more.
Currently, land that has nothing built on it has a low assessed value, so its sewer rate is relatively low. If the parcel tax is adopted, vacant land would be charged based on its potential to hold the amount of residences its zoning permits.
The municipality is looking for input from residents before taking the plan to the province for ratification. Baxter said the municipality wants the province to sign off on the plan through a legislative order.
The meeting takes place at 7 p.m. at Colwood City Hall, 3300 Wishart Rd. The presentation will be posted afterward on the municipal website, www.colwood.ca.
bcleverley@timescolonist.com
------------------------
END.
