Monitoring Wells On Quadra Island

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A joint We Wai Kai/ ICAN Water Security team has been monitoring Quadra Island wells for the past month as part of a much larger project to calculate the island’s water budget.   


"At the moment 13 wells are being monitored, and another three or four will be added from Cape Mudge. So there will probably be 17 deeper wells and  Eileen McKay, particularly, has been saying for a while that we need to add shallow wells.  We'll be doing that hopefully this year," explained Nick Sargent, a former professional hydrologist who is overseeing the well monitoring.


Red Williams Well Drilling Ltd was involved in this part of the project. 


"Just before Christmas, Red Williams offered to help. So we went around and  installed what we call drop pipes, so plastic tubes down in the wells.  Then we drop down, on  basically a fishing line, these little monitoring devices.  They've been running since mid-December, and we hope to do the first reading in the next couple of weeks or so. Once we've read them  and we're okay that they're working and they're set at a reasonable depth,  we'll probably  read them every four to six months." 


This project was made possible thanks to a Indigenous Watershed Grant which is being administered by Jason Price of the We Wai Kai.  Some of the other components are monitoring the island’s rainfall and streamflow, as well as mapping wetlands.


"The water security team was started a few years back, before I joined.  I think with the realization that  issues that had arisen with water supply where there were too many people and too little supply. We're not at that stage on Quadra and probably not on Cortes either,  but it's good to get a handle on the ground water supply before problems arise."