Dear editor,
Re: The proposed water bottling operation in Merville.
Mr. Mackenzie said water levels in the aquifer have increased by 3.2 cm in the last 14 years 鈥� the equivalent of more than 300 million litres of water 鈥� despite 92 years of water extraction by neighboring property owners. This is not credible. We are on the verge of being water poor, compared to the recent past. In fact, we are probably already there.
Long-time residents of the Valley can remember what snow and weather conditions were on Vancouver Island 45 or 50 years ago. There has been a huge change since that time. I learned how to ski on the now abandoned Forbidden Plateau Ski Resort and in those days it would not be uncommon for the chairlift and T-bar to be shut down because of too much snow.
In April and May, we would head over to Gold River for prawn fishing, and wouldn鈥檛 bother with ice for our coolers because it was guaranteed there would be 5 to 10 feet of snow on the side on the road going over the hump on Hwy 28. That means the snowpack filled not only the mountain tops but all the valleys. These days the Comox Glacier has a fraction of the permanent ice it once had. We are now down to five from the 25 small and large permanent glaciers that populated the district stretching from the Comox Glacier to Mt. Albert Edward.
All that water went somewhere, which might 鈥� and I say might 鈥� account for the increase. So now that the well may have gone up a little bit, and the strong recent trend is for precipitation and the snowpack to decrease further in the years to come, common sense dictates we use that small bonus, if it even exists, with extreme caution. Nobody should be allowed to just take what some scientist calls fossil water, and sell it for a profit. I don鈥檛 think any new users should be able to draw down our scanty reserves even further.
I bought my property here on Barr Dr. in Merville in 1985, and at that time I had a single neighbor drawing water. And that was for all of Barr Dr., including Hecker Road on the Barr drive side. Now I have a dozen or more neighbors who have settled here in the last 20 years. There a now lot more straws dipping into that aquifer, and the real population increase in this whole area has mostly happened in just the last 20 years, not the figure of 92 used by Mackenzie. That date is not a valid point of reference.
Fred J. Fern
Merville
