Water conservation is here to stay warns Holyrood councillor
Before he tabled the usual list of building permits, last month, Holyrood councillor Bruce King spoke at length about the town’s recent water ban and concerns about the water system.
“Development will move forward behind infrastructure,” acknowledged King. “We won’t be building houses, and we won’t be doing stuff unless infrastructure is in place to be able to accommodate it.”
King said most of the town’s water issues are due to the age of the pipes in the ground.
“We all know here that the waterlines that are in the ground here in Holyrood in some places, are probably 50 to 60 years of age,” he said. “And I know people were talking about, ‘Well, how about councils of the past, (how come they) never reacted to it?’ Well, probably one of the main reasons is because at the time, the stuff that was in the ground wasn’t past it’s life expectancy. Basically, it was fix the leak and move forward. The problem is now, once we start getting into this term and into the next term, that stuff, if it was put in the ground in 1960 for example, by the start of the next term, that will have been in the ground 70 years. So yes, these things have to be addressed, there’s no doubt about it, but it has to be addressed in a structural manner.”
King assured residents council is addressing concerns, pointing to plans for a new water tank with double the capacity of the current one.
“All these problems never happened overnight, and they’re not going to be fixed overnight,” said King. “But residents need to understand that we understand. We acknowledge the fact and we’re working on trying to fix it.”
Regardless, King said water conservation will be the way of the future, not just in Holyrood but the world over, due to climate change.
“The climate is changing, whether people believe it or not doesn’t matter, it’s changing and it’s changing for the worse, and water is going to be a very important part of maintaining it,” said King. “Years ago, people didn’t like recycling, and it was a hard thing to understand. Now, recycling is as common as anything. The same way with composting. We’re going to have to look at water the same way we look at these things.”
Holyrood isn’t the only town asking its residents to conserve water, he added, listing Torbay, Bay Roberts, Bonavista, Mount Pearl, CBS, and Paradise as towns that have imposed water bans or conservation orders.
King ended his remarks with a lesson from the Gospels.
“The story was, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus and his mother Mary were invited to a wedding, and they ran out of wine, and Mary looked at Jesus and said, ‘Is there anything that you can do about that?’ And Jesus asked the servants to bring him six stone jars of water, and he turned the water into wine,” said King. “We do not have the ability right now to turn wine back into water, and I don’t think most of us here would probably want that anyway, we’d be happier with the wine.”
Mayor Laura Crawley surmised the morale of the story was that council could not perform miracles.
With that out of the way, King brought forward a number of development applications for approval, including new homes at 6 Whitecap Place, 10 Marina Drive, and 12 Eagle Drive, construction of a chapel at Hickey’s Funeral Home, and a change of ownership of a daycare at 2 Seabreeze Drive.