With the weather turning cooler many have forgotten about the drought threat that still lingers.
But we can’t just forget about it. Because while the temperatures have gone down already, we have not started into the fall rainy season.
The pumps will begin working in just a few short weeks if we don’t get rain, and a lot of it.
Thing is, we’re talking more of a biblical-type deluge necessary to make a decent impact on the watershed at this point.
Even a couple of days of pretty solid rain won’t solve our problems. Should Catalyst start pumping water out of Cowichan Lake over the weir into the Cowichan River, as it seems like they will have to, it will mark the first time we have come to this point.
It’s a historic first, but an unfortunate one.
Perhaps it’s the wake-up call we need to finally address the issue that we’ve been talking about for years.
People in Canada’s north have been seeing the tangible effects of climate change for at least a decade.
There’s not a big population up there, though, and most of us have never been any closer to our “great white north” than seeing it in documentaries on television and photo spreads in magazines.
So we’ve pretty much ignored what they’ve had to say on the subject and just continued on with business as usual.
After all, our lives hadn’t changed any.
But now they are. We’re in the middle of our very own climate change conundrum.
Long, hot summers have become something of the norm in the last several years, but more important than the temperature, the amount of rainfall during this period has been virtually non-existent.
So even when we get a relatively cool summer, as we did this year, the problem remains.
Further exacerbating matters, we haven’t been getting the snow pack in the winter to tide us over.
Nature’s water storage — metres-deep snow drifts that once gradually melted as spring turned into summer, sending runoff at a steady, even pace into our thirsty watersheds — has been catastrophically disrupted.
There’s no indication that things are going to get better in the years to come. In fact, things are getting progressively worse.
We’ve got to deal with what is.
That means reconstructing and raising the weir.
It’s going to be expensive. It won’t be popular with everyone. But it is the key to serving our long-term water needs.
