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RDN, city impose Stage 1 water restrictions

Regional District of Nanaimo and city “soft-launch” residents into summer water conservation.
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Dams in the Regional District of Nanaimo are storing water for the summer season as the RDN and city start Stage 1 water restrictions.

Since Saturday, residents in Nanaimo and other communities in the regional district are restricted to sprinkling lawns and landscaping at nighttime 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., any day of the week for any length of time.

Hand watering, drip irrigation and micro irrigation can be applied at any time and vegetable and food gardens are exempt from the restriction.

“The Stage 1 is really just sort of a soft launch into water restrictions just to get people starting to think about it,” said Julie Pisani, RDN drinking water and watershed protection coordinator.

Pisani said snowpack levels in the local watersheds are at historic average levels.

“When we have snowpack levels that are average or, sort of in that vicinity, that gives all that storage beyond what we can store in the reservoir,” Pisani said.

Snowpack in the mountains slowly releases water through snowmelt, which replenishes reservoirs into the dry months of the year.

“So basically, from a water storage perspective, we’re in a good spot because we’ve had average snowpack,” Pisani said.

This year’s snowpack is much heavier than what was seen through the warm winters of 2014 and 2015, when snowpack failed to develop or melted away early.

“For the last five or eight years we have not seen an average year. Normally they’ve been below average,” said Bill Sims, City of Nanaimo water resources manager.

Sims said there is still another three or four weeks that snow could build up in Nanaimo’s Jump Creek watershed and the city’s water supply appears secure for the summer, but it’s always a good idea to plan for the worst case scenario, so the city is already raising the gates on the Jump Creek reservoir dam to beef up water storage.

“Having said that, we’ve still got lots of water in the hills and lots of inflow,” Sims said.

For more information and a map that displays the water service areas in our region and current watering restrictions, please visit the Regional District of Nanaimo’s Team WaterSmart page at www.rdn.bc.ca/cms.asp?wpID=1463.

To learn more about ongoing river and snowpack conditions, please visit the B.C. government River Forecast Centre online at http://bcrfc.env.gov.bc.ca/.



Chris Bush

About the Author: Chris Bush

As a photographer/reporter with the Nanaimo News Bulletin since 1998.
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