Rain Gauge • 2

Life as we comprehend it could not exist without water.

Everything with an organic base depends on water. Humans are mostly water, on average we are 60% water.  Without water our bodies dehydrate, which is why we tell people to drink lots of fluids during hot weather or during an illness when the body is losing fluids rapidly.  Without water acting as the main ingredient of the primordial soup where life began, life as we know it could not have developed on what was a very hostile rock planet some 3.7 billion years ago at the bottom of a shallow body of water.  Water has some interesting properties.  It can be a frozen solid or a liquid or a gas.  When it freezes it expands and it floats on water. If it became dense, as other solids do, it would sink to the bottom of the ocean and our planet would have a perpetually frozen ocean floor.  Water evaporates into a gas if you put energy into it by heating it or leaving it in the sun. Liquid water can be distilled from its gas form by  cooling it. When condensed water falls from the sky we call it rain or snow. If it remains suspended in the air we call it a cloud, a  mist or a fog.   It is so common to our lives that we take it for granted if we have it, and despair if we don’t. 

In 2017 the Capital Regional District issued a report called Climate Projections for the Capital Regional District and updated in 2024 It is filled with maps based on existing data from 1971 to 2000 and projections to 2110. Where we have had a 1971-2000 snowpack of 3 meters on our south island mountains, by 2050,  the report predicts that there will be zero snowpack on our mountains. While the report deals mostly with changes in temperature and precipitation it also has a section on other impacts in our region. Changes to the climate will affect our human health, wastewater and sewage management, water supply, tourism, recreation, transportation network, ecosystems and species, buildings and energy systems, and food and agriculture.  It all starts with water. 

Greater rainfall in a shorter period might be good if you are a lake reservoir. Sooke Lake might accommodate a sudden influx of water in spite of the increased turbulence.  But if you are a watershed the increased short duration rain will not have time to infiltrate the soil and much of the surface water will be shed into streams and rivers and therefore not sink into the underground aquifers.  That’s bad news if you draw your water from a well.  Also bad news if you are a salmon.  Water shortages are a real concern as our summers get dryer and longer – stretching into mid to late September. 

The CRD releases water into the Sooke River to compensate for the lack of water needed by migrating salmon, but all other spawning areas are on their own.  If the salmon can’t get up to their spawning grounds for lack of water then they cannot lay eggs and the spawning run in that river can be damaged or lost. Just recently it was reported that a run of Chinook salmon has fallen below the level of reproduction in one of the northern BC rivers.   If we lose that run, that part of the natural diversity, then we may also damage or lose the bears and eagles that depend on the salmon, and the streams and ecosystems that depend on the natural fertilizers that the decaying salmon provide. Indigenous use and western use of this resource will change. 

Protecting the watersheds and keeping the rain where it falls is essential to the health of diversity in our region, and it all starts with water. 

Chris Moss is an Otter Point resident