Tag Archives: Nick Sargent

Monthly Housing Forum: Water Quality and Quantity

Tune in on May 10th for the second collaborative monthly housing forum hosted by the Cortes Housing Society and Folk University. Themed “Water Quality and Quantity”, this forum featured guest panelists Darren Bond, Nick Sargent, and David Bethune and a following community discussion. This is a recording of the second monthly housing forum in April, hosted over Zoom, with 24 people in attendance. Hear us chat about water, it’s relation to housing, and about how these ideas could be applicable to Cortes.

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Upcoming Virtual Forum on Water Quality and Quantity

The Cortes Housing Society’s Virtual Forum will be returning to the airwaves at 10 AM on Saturday, April 20, with a program on ‘Water Quality and Quantity.’ Host Sadhu Johnstone will be joined by three expert panelists: Darren Bond from Hornby Water Stewardship, Nick Sargent from the Quadra Island Climate Action Network (Quadra ICAN) and David Bethune of Groundwater Solutions. There will also be breakout sessions to discuss how these issues apply to Cortes Island.

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Joint We Wai Kai/ ICAN Team Monitoring Quadra Island Wells

Editor’s note: The well monitoring currently underway Quadra Island is a model of how this could be done on Cortes.

A joint We Wai Kai/ ICAN Water Security team has been monitoring Quadra Island wells for the past month as part of a much larger project to calculate the island’s water budget.   

“At the moment 13 wells are being monitored, and another three or four will be added from Cape Mudge. So there will probably be 17 deeper wells and  Eileen McKay, particularly, has been saying for a while that we need to add shallow wells.  We’ll be doing that hopefully this year,” explained Nick Sargent, a former professional hydrologist who is overseeing the well monitoring.

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When it comes to water security, small rural communities in B.C. largely left high and dry

Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

B.C.’s small rural communities striving for water security as droughts become the norm still sink or swim without much assistance from the province, policy experts say.  

Most of the province has been in the clutches of unprecedented — but long anticipated — climate-induced drought for most of the summer. About 55 per cent of B.C.’s water basins are at Level 5 on the provincial drought scale — the point when adverse socioeconomic or ecosystem impacts are almost certain. 

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Small island community launches big effort to develop water security

Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As a landscape architect specializing in wetland restoration, Bernie Amell knows how water moves across the landscape. 

However, he has had a crash course in drought after Amell and his wife moved to their Quadra Island agricultural acreage on B.C.’s so-called “Wet Coast” three years ago. 

“We arrived in 2021, in the ‘heat dome’ summer, and the shallow well dried up,” said Amell, a member of Quadra Island’s Climate Action Network (I-CAN).

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