Tofino-Ucluelet Westerly News, January 27, 2016

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SEA TuRTlE SAvED

BIRD WATCHERS

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Hypothermic Green sea turtle clinging to life

Owls wow young crowd at the UCC.

Westerly News

TOFINO-UCLUELET

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

WesterlyNews.ca

Ukee suffers rough water

$1.25 (including tax)

District confident water is still safe despite darkness Andrew bAiley

andrew.bailey@westerlynews.ca

If it’s brown you probably don’t want to chug it down, and if it’s black you might want to send it back, but the district says it’s still safe to drink the water. Ucluelet local Sherri McIntyre suffered a particularly disgusting shock last week when she attempted to draw a bath and wound up filling her tub with sludge. “The water was almost black; it was really bad. I was beyond disgusted,” McIntyre told the Westerly News adding dark water is unfortunately not an uncommon sight in her Whispering Pines home. “This has happened every couple weeks for the last four years that we’ve lived in this house.” Ucluelet’s water woes were brought to the forefront in 2014 when local concerns, raised at council meetings and in this newspaper, motivated the district to issue a public information bulletin stating the water was safe to drink and a community forum was held to address concerns. To combat what it believed, and still believes, to be a purely aesthetic problem, the district began flushing its pipes more intensely and put plans in place to address the issue. “From our meeting in 2014, we’re trying to continue to improve with water quality within the community,” the district’s manager of public works Warren Cannon told the Westerly News last week. “The focal point was to look at the reservoirs this year.” Ucluelet has two water reservoirs, Mercantile Creek and Lost Shoe Aquifer, and both are currently being drained so they can each be cleaned. See WAtEr page 2

WENDY SZANISZLO PhOtO

StrANDED SEAL: Local marine mammal researcher Wendy Szaniszlo helped rescue this rare and endangered Guadalupe fur seal last week. The animal is being treated at the Vancouver Aquarium but he’s in rough shape. Read about it on page 7.

Stolen tsunami statue returned Anonymous thief gets cold feet after social media outcry Andrew bAiley

andrew.bailey@westerlynews.ca

A small wooden statue is living the good fortune it symbolizes. The 20-centimetre-tall statue, which depicts Shinto God Daikoku holding a magic hammer to represent good fortune and a

bag of treasure to symbolize wealth, keeps finding its way to safety. It was discovered on Long Beach in 2013 by Ucluelet’s then-mayor Bill Irving and is believed to have floated to the West Coast from Japan after the devastating March 2011 tsunami. See thIEF page 16


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