The source of grey water spotted in Bowker Creek last week remains a mystery.
A photo of the contaminated stream posted to an Oak Bay Facebook group on Dec. 3 caused a stir, with many frustrated that the waterway, which the Friends of Bowker Creek Society has worked hard to protect, had been polluted.
Eldan Goldenberg, a Friends of Bowker Creek Society volunteer, who leads the organization’s water-quality team, has been working to solve the puzzle.
Last week, Goldenberg, along with other Friends of Bowker Creek Society volunteers, checked the waterway’s quality upstream of the Cadboro Bay Road and Foul Bay Road intersection. There, the water was clear, when downstream, it was murky.
“What that tells us is that it’s almost certainly entering the creek itself in the culvert under the Cadboro Bay/Foul Bay intersection,” said Goldenberg, adding that, below the streets, storm drains from Oak Bay, Victoria and Saanich pour into the waterway.
“Oak Bay public works has investigated and can confirm it is not coming from any district infrastructure and is coming from outside of the district,” said Hayley Goodgrove, Oak Bay’s manager of communications, in a Dec. 6 email.
Also in a Dec. 6 email, Victoria's manager of communications Colleen Mycroft said the city received two reports of murky water in Bowker – one on Dec. 3 and another on Dec. 4 – and responded to both. Mycroft didn't say whether Victoria thinks the spill originated within its borders.
Saanich said it received two reports on Dec. 3 from a taxpayer that two construction sites on Shelbourne Street had released silt into Bowker.
According to a Dec. 6 email from Saanich's manager of communications Kelsie McLeod, near the intersection of Shelbourne Street and Mortimer Street, a contractor’s settlement tank was leaking into a catch basin, and near the intersection of Shelbourne Street and McRae Avenue, silty water was running into Bowker Creek from the same contractor.
“It was a concerned resident just noticing that there was grey flow coming in,” Aidan McCrea, a Saanich communications advisor, told the Oak Bay News on Dec. 6. “Then Saanich crews went down, had a look at it and came to the conclusion that it was a settlement tank and notified [Emergency Management BC].”
McCrea said district engineering staff, who are heading up the Shelbourne project, were going over sediment management plans with crews onsite.
However, the contractor Saanich identified in its Dec. 6 email staunchly refutes the district’s claims.
“Silt is definitely not coming from our site,” the company's general manager told the Oak Bay News on Dec. 6. “We have an environmental management plan we’re following it and there’s other work happening around the area, so we can say with absolute certainty it’s not coming from our site.”
Goldenberg isn’t sure Saanich’s explanation accounts for the murkiness people have reported seeing in the Oak Bay sections of Bowker Creek.
“It's also possible that these are separate from the spill that's been reported in Oak Bay,” he said, adding that Friends of Bowker Creek Society volunteers have seen murky water near McRae Avenue, clear water downstream in the section of Bowker Creek between Hillside Mall and Cadboro Bay Road and murky water again downstream from the intersection of Cabroro Bay Road and Foul Bay Road.
“Since this has been intermittent all along, it's possible that we've just been unlucky in our timing and missed the problem when it's been in the intermediate reaches,” added Goldenberg. “Or it could be that we have multiple separate spills, with Saanich having – to their great credit – taken care of the ones in their jurisdiction while there's an as yet unidentified source further downstream.”
Goldenberg said he can’t say for sure which explanation makes more sense, but he said he leans toward the latter scenario, due to the “very intense milky colouration” in two photos he received that were taken near Bee Street, which is just downstream of the Cadboro Bay Road and Foul Bay Road intersection.
“A lot of water enters the creek between McRae and there, including a whole fork that comes down from Cedar Hill and joins the main stream near Hillside Mall,” he said. “So we often find that turbidity which is quite bad around Browning Park isn't visible at all by Oak Bay because it's got so diluted, whereas the worst of this week's Oak Bay photos don't look watered down at all.”
No matter where the murkiness originates, foreign materials in Bowker could prove detrimental to the waterway.
“The finer stuff smothers things that live in among the gravel, which includes a lot of the invertebrates that are at the bottom of the food chain and also salmon eggs themselves,” said Goldenberg.
This could impede the organization's years-long drive to repopulate Bowker with salmon.
In 2021 and 2022, the group incubated chum salmon eggs from the Goldstream Fish Hatchery in the creek, in the hopes that full-grown fish will return to spawn there in 2025.
“From the point of view of the salmon restoration project, even the most natural sediment is bad when we get too much of it,” he said.
Goldenberg is asking the public to immediately report all instances of pollution in Bowker to public works departments in Victoria, Oak Bay and Saanich.
