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.