To the Editor,
Re: B.C. company reviving Foothills project, Jan. 28.
Ah, so now it’s all becoming clearer – the water from the City of Nanaimo isn’t really for the relatively few people who have water quality/quantity problems from their wells.
The strategy of trotting out a few people in the local media who are having issues with their well water harkens back to when we were trying to initiate a frank discussion about the solution to fecal coliforms found in some of our ditches. Local media let themselves be convinced by vested interests that we were ‘literally a cesspool’ and ‘someone was surely going to die.’
The council of the day had absolutely no interest in confirming where the majority of these coliforms were actually coming from – dogs, farm animals, deer, birds and septic tanks. They were so convinced that they already knew the answer that they refused to complete a survey of problem areas as a condition of receiving government grant money.
You can’t implement effective solutions to problems if you don’t first seek to understand the problem and everything costs money.
There are far less expensive ways of dealing with failing septic fields in a defined area than ‘sewerizing’ the whole community or dealing with geographically limited contamination than by piping by water from 30 kilometres away. But large-scale developers need sewers and water and so the convincing begins. We need to be very careful about letting a few large landowners decide the future of our community for all the rest of us.
Hans J. LarsenLantzville
