Tag Archives: Cortes Bay

Communications, History

How telephones came to Cortes Island 

According to Lynne Jordan,  former president of the Cortes Island Museum, there have been telephones on Cortes Island for more than 110 years. They arrived in 1910, along with telegraphs, but only in the stores.

“Telegrams were really cheap. They were so much for 10 words and so much for 100 words.  People got really good at confining their messages to 10 words. Telegraphs that came in for people were just put in an envelope and then pinned on the bulletin board at the store.  Then they either had to check themselves or a friend would tell them that there was a message there for them,” she said.

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Housing, Poverty, Rivers & Oceans

Trying to clean up Cortes Island’s abandoned boats and provide homes for the homeless 

There are probably a dozen abandoned boats on Cortes Island right now, and Dominic dos Santos would like to have them towed away.

“A lot of them are floating. Some of them just have no names on them. People just leave them there. it’s just been 15 years of ‘not my problem.’  We have fiberglass shards on every beach now because they abandon the boats and let ’em get destroyed on the rocks . All this stuff is gonna wind up on the beach in the next five, 10 years?” he said.

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Water

Cortes Island’s impending water shortage

Cortes Island is experiencing a wetter than normal Spring this year, but some of Cortes Island’s shallow well owners experience water shortages every summer. Scientists appear to agree that there will be more severe shortages in the future. 

This is a global phenomenon and there appear to be many causes: the depletion of forest coverage, growth of human infrastructure, natural drought cycles and, on top of all that, the transition to a warmer global temperature.

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Disaster

Canadian Coast Guard reopens seasonal rescue boat station on Cortes Island

by Louis Belcourt, CKTZ News, through an LJI grant from Canada-info.ca

The Canadian Coast Guard has four seasonally operated Inshore Rescue Boat stations across the BC coast that reopened for the season on May 20th.

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Forests, Rivers & Oceans

Environmental concerns about the Gorge Harbour log dump

When a large volume of logs were dumped in Gorge Harbour, during the 1970s and 80s, they caused extensive damage to the underwater environment.

One of the questions raised at Mosaic’s Cortes Island ZOOM meeting, last January, revolved around the possibility that reactivating the log dump could also have negative impacts. Mike Moore dove beneath the log dump about fifteen years ago. At that time, he observed a thick layer of wood debris and sediments, covered by ‘bacterial mats.’ Moore was concerned about the possibility a new disturbance of the sediments could pollute nearby shellfish operations. 

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