Dear editor:
Your front-page, above-the-fold story in The Lake Report’s Nov. 2 issue, “Leaky sewers contaminating NOTL creek with E. coli, town says,” should give every resident in Niagara-on-the-Lake not only pause for thought but also
create a demand for immediate action.
The town has known since 2015 that one creek running through town has “some of the brownest, foulest water in
the (Niagara) region)” and “the highest level of E. coli of any water system in the entire Niagara region,” according to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.
This is astonishing in a beautiful, historic, globally recognized town such as Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Are the memories of the Walkerton water contamination so distant? People died in Walkerton.
An unconscionable number of First Nations reserves have been without clean drinking water for years and some for decades. And fresh clean water is becoming more and more scarce across the entire world.
Just two days after the publication of your article, the New York Times carried a front-page story on the “tangle of rules” around groundwater across the U.S., which is also becoming more and more polluted and unregulated.
To think that every lovely forest creek running through NOTL backyards is contaminated with sewage cross-contaminating storm water is appalling and an unacceptable danger to human and animal health.
The cost to fix it is apparently in the “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.
And in the same issue, a debate about the cost of a traffic roundabout is ballparked at $3.9 million, an underestimation by two to three times, according to a correspondent with knowledge of expropriations across the province.
Letter writer Peter Rusin (“With expropriations, roundabout could cost $10 million or more,” Nov. 2) estimates this roundabout will end up costing between $10 million and $12 million.
Water matters more than traffic or construction or ease of transportation. Clean water is survival.
In the words of oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, “No blue, no green. No water, no life.”
Daphne Lavers
NOTL
