N.S. community frustrated with water quality, receiving no provincial funding

A small community in Nova Scotia has learned they will not be receiving provincial funding for good quality water.

The 30 residents living in Salem, N.S., cannot remember a time when they had good water.

Over the years, the community has been calling for clean, drinkable water. Hard, salty water rusts and discolours everything it touches.

With the Salem community located far from the Municipality of Pictou County, a water system was never built.

However, over the years, communities around the area began to populate with new homes, schools and other amenities. This forced the municipality to expand its water system to those areas.

Homeowners in Salem then began requesting to have water and wastewater extended to the community.

According to Robert Parker, Pictou County warden, the municipality drafted a proposal for a funding program.

“Through this program, the provincial and federal government would cover nearly 70 per cent of the project, while the municipality would cover the rest," he said.

Parker says the proposal included residents’ testimony and the project’s design and cost.

Eleven months after submitting the proposal, the municipality received a notice that Salem water and wastewater are not going to be funded.

“It was upsetting. I had spoken to people [in the community] thinking they are going to approve us since we’ve submitted applications before. They were always approved,” said Parker.

Parker decided to meet with the minister of municipal affairs, John Lore, and said he was met with reasons that did not make sense to him.

“They said the density of the population was low, the form was submitted late, and some of the information was missing.”

The municipality’s chief accounting officer, Brian Cullen, followed up with the department of municipal affairs and they said the application was incomplete.

However, he said the municipality has similar submitted proposals in the past that were funded.

“I think at the end of the day, the department had material they wanted to support and the project didn’t match up with that,” Cullen said.

The MLA for the area, Karla MacFarlane, said she was unaware of the issues in the community.

“The municipality, for whatever reason, neglected to involve me from the start and when things got off the rails, that’s when they got me involved,” she said.

Jocelyn Cruickshank is one of 30 homeowners in Salem.

She has lived in the area for 25 years, and while she loves the community, the poor water quality has impacted her financially and emotionally.

“We don’t have company over meals. You can come and sit in the living room but not the kitchen. It’s hard,” she said.

When Cruickshank and her husband moved in to her house, there was a dug well and a drilled well, which the previous owner was using, but once her and her husband had kids the well would frequently run out of water.

“We got a third well and the other two are shut off,” Cruickshank said.

Like everyone else in the community, Cruickshank has to buy bottled water or get it from Greenhill Spring to cook, clean and even brush her teeth.

Cruickshank has had to replace taps, pipes, and the washing machine numerous times throughout the years.

“We don’t have a washing machine last for more than a year,” she said.

She has also installed filtration systems, but after a year those would break down as well.

“It costs $10,000 and then on top of that we would have to have it fixed every quarterly," she said.

Throughout the years that she has lived in Salem, Cruickshank says she has never had family dinners at her home.

“People can taste the salt off the utensils we would be eating from,” she said.

Cruickshank says she has considered moving many times but does not believe she would get a mortgage approval from the bank for her house because of the water.

After the municipality’s proposal was rejected by the province, the municipality voted to pay for Salem’s water system itself.

If the costs are close enough to the $2.7 million estimate that was in the original proposal, Salem could see clean drinking water by the end of this summer.