Don River Day points out pollution, abuse of river

Huggett, Howard
http://www.connexions.org/SevenNews/Docs/7News-V11N21-Ref54100-Huggett-DonRiverDayPointsOutPollution.htm
Date Written:  1981-04-24
Publisher:  Seven News
Year Published:  1981
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23881

Dumping contaminants into the Don River is supposedly no longer allowed, but it continues and the effects are serious.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

There is something about canoes that stirs the imagination of many Canadians. When the Europeans first came to this continent they found out that the North American Indians had developed a craft superbly designed for navigating the lakes and rivers of this vast continent. Without the canoe this land could not have been explored, nor could our first industry, the fur trade, have been started. It is part of our history.

I talked to one man who told me that his son had a 26 foot canoe that was built for him by an Indian friend of his and that he used to travel the Fraser River in B.C. Now the Don is a pretty small stream compared to the Fraser, but the metropolis of Toronto began at the mouth and on the banks of the river. Too often we ignore and neglect the Don.

Lately we have been given an unpleasant reminder that the river is alive and active. The Keating Channel at the mouth is silting up at the rate of about 60,000 cubic yards of sediment a year. That’s quite an achievement for such a small stream, but then the Don River drops more than 800 feet from the headwaters to the lake, so the water flows swiftly and causes a lot of erosion. Besides we have speeded up the flow by removing most of the forest that used to cover the watershed – a survey of some years ago estimated that there was less than 7% of it under trees. The effect of this and the wholesale paving over of so much of the area around the river has meant that during spring thaws and after rainfalls the runoff goes tearing downstream at a destructive rate. You could say that the Don is paying us back for our neglect and we have to pay the cost of dredging out the channel.

But there is more to it than that. That sediment is polluted.

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