Victoria Harbour (British Columbia) - Ecology

Ecology

Despite the small size of the watershed land area of the Victoria and Saanich Peninsulas, Victoria Harbour is an estuary.

Some of the fresh water tributaries of the harbour include:

• Colquitz Creek
  • Beaver Lake
    • Elk Lake
      • O'Donnel Creek
  • Durrell Creek
  • Swan Lake Creek
    • Swan Lake
      • Blenkinsop Lake
• Craigflower Creek
  • Thetis Lakes (Upper and Lower)
• Cecelia Creek
• James Bay Creek (this tributary now runs in culverts under landfill, see also Beacon Hill Park)

In Portage Inlet there are 70 ha (170 acres) of eelgrass growing under water. Portage Inlet and the Gorge Waterway may also be home to the largest colony of Pacific oysters on the west coast. Craigflower Creek, one of the tributaries of Portage Inlet, is a spawning area for Coho salmon and Chum salmon. Pacific herring also use Portage Inlet and the Gorge Waterway for spawning.

Victoria Harbour was recognized as a Migratory Bird Sanctuary in 1923. The Upper and Lower Thetis Lakes, which discharge into Portage Inlet, were Canada's first nature sanctuary in 1958.

In 1965 the city of Victoria started using the former Mud Bay on the south shore of Victoria West as a garbage dump. When Mud Bay was filled in it was superseded by the Hartland landfill.

In 1998 the Cecelia Creek Clean Up Committee was formed to work on restoring the environment in and around the Cecelia Creek that flows into Selkirk Water.

Between 2002 and 2006 Transport Canada spent over $4 million to clean up properties in the harbour to stricter environmental standards. BC Hydro and the Federal Government have undertaken a $2 million clean-up of the eastern shore of Rock Bay which was once the site of a coal gasification plant. The plant had been the last run by the Victoria Gas Company which had started in 1860 and was one of the forerunners of BC Hydro.

Through the coordination and services of the Capital Regional District (CRD) the municipalities of Colwood, Esquimalt, Langford, Oak Bay, Saanich, Victoria, and View Royal discharged an average of 129,000,000 L (105 acre·ft) of filtered but untreated sewage into the ocean every day in 2006. At two filtration facilities (Clover Point in Victoria and Macauley Point in Esquimalt) sewage is screened to exclude objects larger than 6 millimetres before being released into the Juan de Fuca Strait via marine outfalls. Solid matter that is filtered out of the effluent is trucked to the Hartland landfill. In 2006 Barry Penner, BC Minister of Environment at the time, concluded that wastewater treatment should be taking place in Victoria and surrounding communities. The CRD has started planning the construction of wastewater treatment plants.