The following are potential emergency situations that could benefit from upland water storage, using off- channel reservoirs, with supply wells feeding continuous, gravity pipelines.
  
Seven emergency scenarios and the impacts on the availability of water.

1. A large wildfire in the forested land in the upper watershed:
Fire retardant chemicals, surface ash, large volumes of charred wood and erosion sediments could render the Englishman River unusable as a drinking water source.

2. A multi-year drought:
Will cause the river flows to be too low, temperature and algae content to be too high, for safe potable water. Groundwater levels decline in the entire area.

3. Earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone:
Damage to supply pipes, storage tanks and distribution infrastructure and create high levels of turbidity, mud flows or complete disruption of flows in the Englishman River.

4. Long term electric power disruption: Transformers / substations .. under-sea cable  ... tsunami
The new water treatment plant and supply system will be completely dependent on high capacity electric power to:    Pump the raw water from the river intake, up to the treatment plant.    Pump the water through the treatment process.  Back-flush, remove and process the sediments and contaminants.  Pump the processed water though the distribution network.   Without a consistent high capacity electric power source the water supply system would not work.

5. Urban / Interface wildfire:
Water requirements during extended fire fighting operations may not be available. A multi- unit fire emergency requires many thousands of liters of water per minute. It is doubtful if the new treatment plant could supply that much water for several hours or days.

6. Super-storm with heavy precipitation and high winds:
Log jams, erosion, and land/mud slides in the watershed would impact raw water availability. Power disruptions caused by blown down trees and poles could disrupt water treatment and distribution.
​
7.  Water contamination in the well-field recharge area and/or loss of this groundwater supply:
Highly vulnerable groundwater catchment/recharge zone.

Observations and opinion of: Trevor Wicks   TRENTEC INNOVATIONS     Qualicum Beach

 By Trevor Wicks
I was exploring along the Englishman River the other day when I noticed a greenish tinge to the water.
I took a photo of it immediately below the current drinking-water intake at Turner Road in Parksville.
Could be it be algae?
There is certainly ‘rock snot’ algae upstream of the intake in the Englishman. A photo of ‘rock snot’ algae in the Englishman River, below, taken some years ago.

Trevor Wicks Photo
High water temperature and high nutrient levels in surface water can create toxic algae in the drinking water. Some water-treatment processes actually cause the release of toxins from algae. It will be important to determine if the proposed new treatment plant will remove these toxins from the water.
Here are some sources of information on the subject.

From     www.fwr.org/drnkwatr/algaltox.htm:
Some species of cyanobacteria produce toxins within their cell structure. These toxins can be released when the algae die and decay. Toxin release can also occur during the growth phase of young algae. The implications of toxic algal blooms are significant and likely to become more so if global warming results in reduced flow in rivers with correspondingly less dilution for effluents and agricultural run-off.

From    http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/diseases/cyanobacteria/en/
Cyanobacteria or blue-green algae occur worldwide especially in calm, nutrient-rich waters. Some species of cyanobacteria produce toxins that affect animals and humans. People may be exposed to cyanobacterial toxins by drinking or bathing in contaminated water. The most frequent and serious health effects are caused by drinking water containing the toxins (cyanobacteria), or by ingestion during recreational water contact.

From http://water.epa.gov/scitech/swguidance/standards/criteria/nutrients/upload/cyanobacteria_factsheet.pdf:
Health effects caused by cyanotoxins The cyanotoxins include neurotoxins (affect the nervous system), hepatotoxins (affect the liver), and dermatoxins (affect the skin). The presence of high levels of cyanotoxins in recreational water and drinking water may cause a wide range of symptoms in humans, including fever, headaches, muscle and joint pain, blisters, stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, mouth ulcers, and allergic reactions. Such effects can occur within minutes to days after exposure. In severe cases, seizures, liver failure, respiratory arrest, and (rarely) death may occur. There is evidence that long-term exposure to microcystins and cylindrospermopsin may promote the growth of tumors and may cause cancer.

Water Management-or Mismanagement-in Canada and California
They say water is the new oil-the likely cause of future wars, and some current wars as well. Everywhere in the world water is an issue one way or another-even in rain-drenched parts of Canada.
I had the privilege of attending a two-day Canadian water conference at the end of May. Remembering the successful water forum we had held at Fresno City College last March, I thought it would be worth looking at the similarities and the differences.

Water Issues in Canada
The issues faced by the Canadians are not quite the same as ours. The water conference, titled “Your Water, Your Future,” was held in Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island. I am used to Fresno, where we get a little more than 11 inches of rain in a year; parts of Vancouver Island get 135 inches of rain per year. Sometimes Californians cast a longing eye on all that Canadian water, wondering how they might get their hands on some of it to relieve drought-stricken California.
A word of warning Californians-the Canadians are not too happy about the idea of shipping their water southward because of the damage it would cause to the Canadian ecosystem. Some parts of British Columbia are already experiencing saltwater intrusion into the aquifers because the aquifers are being overused. In a way, it is just a larger version of the fight in California over whether to ship northern California water to Los Angeles, with all the environmental effects that has on the north.
Setting aside the issue of potential water exports, Canadians are already having serious problems of their own with the water even as they hang onto it. Don’t think quantity-think quality. The problem for many Canadians is trying to keep their water clean enough to drink.

How to Destroy a Watershed
The conference agenda included a tour of the watershed for the drinking water of nearby Parksville. I was appalled. No one who went on the tour would ever again want to touch their lips to a glass of Parksville water-even after it has been treated with chlorine.
We toured the watershed by bus, which was quite easy to do because there are lots of streets and roads crisscrossing it. There are streets everywhere because people are building houses and are living right in the middle of the watershed. Whatever pesticides and fertilizers these people use on their landscaping pass right through the soil and into the water, which drains directly into a nearby shallow aquifer. Even more troubling, there is no sewer system so people’s septic tanks leech into the same aquifer.

That is not the worst of it. As we drove across the watershed, we saw some unbelievable sources of contamination. There is a cemetery next to a creek that flows toward the waterworks. There is a large pig farm with two huge piles of manure; the farm is about 100 feet from a ditch that drains toward the drinking-water pumps. There are also three auto wreckers in the watershed, all leaking various types of fluid into the shallow aquifer. There is a former sand and gravel operation that has since been converted into a landfill dump, right down close to the waterworks; who knows what leeches into the groundwater from the dump.

Here is the background to all of that. Based on an anti-regulatory philosophy, a conscious choice was made in Parksville that the area would have little in the way of regulation. Both individuals and commercial interests can do just about whatever they want. Well, if you ever want to see what unregulated economic activity can lead to, come to Parksville.

The result is a mess. The drinking water is highly polluted. The organic pollutants can be neutralized, to a degree, by adding lots of chlorine to the water. That creates its own problems, because as the chlorine breaks down the organic matter, new toxic substances are formed. Meanwhile, the chlorine does nothing to remove the battery acid, gasoline, antifreeze and such that is coming from the auto wreckers. From the dump, there likely is a virtual witch’s brew of toxic substances.
The water is not treated to remove these other toxic substances; it is only treated with chlorine. As a result, people are starting to get sick, and for the most part they don’t know why. There are cancer clusters developing-but, as usual, it is hard to prove the cause of a cancer cluster.
Sadly, even if they were able to prove that the water was the problem, there would be no one that could be held accountable. The cemetery, the pig farm, the auto wreckers, the landfill-none of them are violating any regulations, so technically none of them are doing anything wrong. The negative effects on the population are treated as unavoidable collateral damage. What a callous way to run a community.
Parksville is a particularly blatant example of mismanagement of a watershed, but it is not alone. The city of Nanaimo itself, where the conference was being held, has a compromised watershed. The watershed is not owned by the city, but is privately owned by logging interests-the biggest of them being Island Timberlands.

The timber companies are clear-cutting the watershed, causing all sorts of issues for the water. The soil is torn up by the logging operations and much of it is washed downstream, which doesn’t help the water quality at all. A bigger problem may be the toxic fertilizers they use as they replant the forest with the goal of harvesting the second-growth lumber as soon as possible. What will happen as these fertilizers make their way into the water draining from these clear-cut fields? No one knows yet, but it looks very much like a disaster waiting to happen.

By Brian Wilford
When Trevor Wicks came to Oceanside from Alberta in 1980, he fell in love with the wet, lush green of the temperate rainforest.
Even in the depths of summer, the morning dew would rise in the warm sun, clouds would form in the afternoon sky and a summer shower would grace the close of day.
“There were many wetlands and swamps,” says Wicks. “The creeks were flowing.”
The entire Springwood-Maple Glen area, almost all of western Parksville, was a giant wetland, cut by Romney and Carey creeks, and full of bullrushes and willows.
But Trevor and his wife Eileen weren’t the only ones smitten by the east coast of Vancouver Island.
With hundreds and soon thousands of people moving to the area, drainage ditches were dug, fill trucked in and creeks buried in pipes to make way for tidy subdivisions.
People thought they were making a retirement and vacation paradise, says Wicks, a consultant with Trentec Innovations who has studied hydrological systems around the world, but what they were creating was another Easter Island.

Easter Island was once lush and tropical, supporting a large population. Wikimedia Commons Photo


Famous for its giant stone statues, Easter Island, 3,500 kilometres (2,180 miles) off the coast of Chile, was once lush and tropical, supporting a population of some 15,000.
Today, supporting a population a third of that, it’s largely a barren, rugged, windswept grassland.
“Somebody cut the last tree on Easter Island,” Wicks says. “Easter Island, the Mayans, Egypt, Myanmar all had amazing civilizations until human activity changed the hydrology.”
Starting with the pioneers, he says, “We’ve logged the hillsides and drained the land because we don’t want puddles in our yards. We’ve paved and built so there are no permeable surfaces.
“We’ve created these artificial areas of extreme drought, like a desert.
“It’s a lose-lose cycle: How to create a desert in 140 years.”
We can irrigate crops by drawing groundwater, he says, but that draws down the groundwater level and then the plants can no longer reach the water on their own.
“Nothing in nature takes groundwater,” Wicks says. “We seem to take it for granted that we can drill wells — in California they’re drilling them over 2,000 feet deep — but it cannot continue without creating a desert.”
These days in Oceanside, the morning dew is sparse and scattered, in may places non-existent, Wicks says, and so summer showers have become welcome, rare events.
“These bright-blue summer skies without a cloud in sight, we rarely used to get these, and certainly not day after day like we see now,” he says. “You wonder why there aren’t any clouds? It’s because we’ve disturbed the hydrological cycle.
“The temperate rainforest has become a semi-desert climate like California.”
But the effects on the Oceanside micro-climate, as with other micro-climates on the east coast of the Island, don’t stop there.
“There’s a compounding effect,” Wicks says: Less rain, more heat, more wind, less moisture, less vegetation, longer summer, more heat, more wind, lower groundwater, depleted soil, well, you see where this is going.
“The trees die off, there’s no shade, no transpiration, and you create a desert. It’s toast for a long time.
“You think it’s hot this summer? We ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of temperature.”

The Island rainforest’s legendary towering conifers are in the process of dying, Wicks says. Brian Wilford Photo


Part of why we’re not there yet is because of the rainforest’s legendary trees.
Unfortunately, many of those trees are dead or dying, Wicks says. “There won’t be hardly any of these big trees in residential areas in 10 or 15 years.”
It could also happen more quickly, he says. “One big fire could be absolutely devastating. (The trees) couldn’t be replaced. It would take hundreds of years.”
The towering conifers may look fine but, if you look at the tops, he says, there’s no bright-green new growth.
“They’re already in the process of dying,” Wicks says. “It’s a matter of time.
“Nearly all the Western Red Cedars are gone or are on their way out.”
Even larger forested areas, like the Heritage Forest in Qualicum Beach and Rathtrevor Provincial Park, are suffering, he says, the trees unable to reach sufficient water and nutrients.
“It’s stunning to see the loss of green in the forest canopy,” he says. “Now you can see through the canopy. It used to be completely covered.”
The loss of cover, of course, means less shade, more heat, more dry wind and so on. The winter rains just run off the hard ground.
There are things that can be done, Wicks says. “We should be planting (semi-desert-loving) trees around here like crazy to replace the ones that are dying.”
And we should stop taking groundwater, he says, and instead start digging holes to hold rainwater.
But he doubts we will.
“It’s a strange situation,” Wicks says. “We think we are smart but we don’t see the longterm situation.
“The shame is that we live in a perfect situation. Anywhere in the world would be envious of us but we haven’t learned to manage the ecosystem.
“We’re as short of water here as they are in Arizona, where they get four inches of rain a year. It’s absurd.”