Rural wells west of Kitchener are running dry as the city is desperate to find more water.
Construction plans are on hold because of the water situation which has caught city politicians by surprise. No building permits for high-rise residential developments are being approved. The two top officials in charge of water quit just before the crisis emerged into the public eye.
Now there are calls for an inquiry and the Waterloo Region staff and politicians are scrambling to fix some facilities that have long needed maintenance and repair work and to find more water sources.
During the uproar, Wilmot Township learned that Kitchener has been taking more water than they knew. The Region has responded by scrapping a commitment to limit how much water it draws from township wells.
Chicken farmer Alan Drost is convinced that the city wells have depleted water he was drawing from his farm well at Petersburg. He has to scramble to truck in water for laying hens and now has installed a large water storage tank.
Clarke Rieck, owner or Lyndon Fish Farm, is worried that his spring-fed lake may run short of water. He said if that happens, he will need to invest about $4 million in a fix.
His operation is a fish hatchery and recreational fishing for about 7,000 visitors per year.
The farm where I grew up has some of the headwaters for that operation.
A number of non-farming rural residents say they have been experiencing water issues that they suspect are related to the city wells – issues such as lowering water levels in their wells and discoloured water.
The water issue is not new. For at least 50 years there has been talk about building a pipeline either south to Lake Erie or north-west to Lake Huron. Either would make water much more expensive.
When Maple Leaf Foods was looking for a site to build a new meat-packing plant, it looked closely at Kitchener and rejected that option because of the water issue. It built the new plant in Hamilton.
Rural water issues are far from new. A beautiful trout stream on the Stewart Cressman farm south-west of Kitchener dried up when a city well was opened nearby about 60 years ago.
When I was a little gaffer, I fished for trout in that stream.
Cressman, who was chair of the Agriculture Research Institute of Ontario, a director on the Ontario pork marketing board and now is a Wilmot Township farmer, is watching one of his children running a produce business on the farm. It obviously depends on a reliable source for irrigation water.
