Five BC environmental groups are calling on the provincial government to conduct an environmental assessment of proposals to extract water from 40 wilderness creeks.
Sierra Club Malaspina, Sierra Club Quadra Island, the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association, Friends of Bute Inlet and the Campbell River chapter of the Council of Canadians have asked Murray Coell, BC’s environment minister, to authorize a formal environmental assessment covering applications affecting streams in Toba, Jervis, Bute and Knight inlets.
The applications are for pairs of licences to remove water from each stream, to a maximum of 112.5 cubic metres (24,750 gallons) per day per stream. As well as a water licence application, the land application is for Crown land at the mouth of each stream where water removal would take place. Water will be collected from a skiff through a pump or hose and funnel and the skiff will offload onto a barge, then transport the water by truck to a bottling business.
“This is a completely new dimension in water exploitation, unlike anything the public has seen before,” said Daniel Bouman, of the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association. “The sheer number of applications, the cumulative potential environmental impacts of the scheme, and certainly the growing level of public concern, all justify a full environmental assessment.”
Powell River Regional District rural directors reviewed the applications for Toba, Jervis and Bute inlets at the November 2010 planning committee meeting. Subsequently, the directors passed a motion at the board meeting to advise the province’s Integrated Land Management Bureau that the regional district had no objection to issuing eight licences of occupation for 30 years for commercial water bottling purposes on creeks in the Toba Inlet area. The motion was subject to two conditions being met, that the extracted water is bottled in British Columbia and that the regional district receives a referral if there are any significant changes to the water licensing tenures.
