North Cedar Improvement District

Winter Newsletter (Jan 2010)

Living Water Smart

All municipalities have to carefully manage our water to ensure this precious resource is available for everyone. Households can live water smart and help to conserve and protect our water on a daily basis. Think water efficient when you buy products like washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, irrigation systems, taps and toilets. Remember NCID offers a low flush toilet rebate of $75.00 for up to 2 toilets per household. Shower under a “low flow” showerhead. Reduce or eliminate the use of paints, fertilizers and pesticides in your home and garden and never pour them down the drain. Use an efficient method like drip irrigation to water your plants.

In BC, water use is on average 490 litres per person per day with the Canadian average being 330 litres per person per day. Dripping taps are a major cause of wasted water and can also cause water damage in the home. Fixing a dripping tap can save up to 300 litres of quality drinking water per week. Toilets account for 30% of indoor water use. A running toilet has the same effect as a dripping tap, only it wastes much more water that a tap does. Low flush toilets have come down in price where by you can almost pay for the entire toilet with the rebates you can receive from NCID and now the Regional District of Nanaimo. The average garden hose pours out 20 litres a minute. Homes that have irrigation systems MUST become familiar with how to program their systems when we go to stage 2 for water restrictions. We noted that many homes with irrigation systems did not comply with the restrictions because they did not know how to re-program the irrigation system to not come on and water all night. Lawns do come back nice and green in the fall and a drip irrigation system is far superior to any other irrigation system when it comes to water conservation and much lower costs on your water utility invoice, a win/win all the way around. Less than 30% of municipally-treated water is actually used for drinking. The rest goes down the drain or toilet or on our gardens.

BC’s water is essential to our quality of life. Impacts of climate change, our growing population and economic growth means that we need a different approach to water management and living water smart provides for sustainable water stewardship for all municipalities. It will take a collective effort to make this a reality. We must all work together to protect our water sources and manage water demands by modernizing water systems and infrastructure and living water smart.

2010 Assessment Notices

Enclosed with your mailed newsletter, is the 2010 Assessment Notice. The local Government Act states an assessment notice must be sent when a parcel tax is being levied each year. On the assessment notice is a letter and number designation such as A1. Go down to the category that is A1, read the description of parcels that fall under A1 which should match your property. If it does not please notify the office that the description does not seem to match your parcel and we will correct the assessment notice. This is just a notice and does not require any action on your part unless the designation is incorrect.

NCVFD - 2009 Training

From December 2008 until December 2009 there were 51 regular Tuesday night training sessions held at the fire hall. In total the man hours dedicated to training in 2009 was 2352 hours. This is a record for the department and reflects the dedication the volunteer members of the fire department have for maintaining current skills while taking on new challenges.

Training topics included communications, driver training, pump operations, motor vehicle rescue, first responder training, ropes and knots, ladders, SCBA, fire suppression and attack, ventilation, search and rescue and many more topics. There was familiarization training within the old boundary of Cedar and much within the new additional boundary so the volunteers would be comfortable with the new area that now falls within the NCID boundaries for fire protection. As we reported prior, 375 new parcels were added to the boundaries of Cedar which had been under the jurisdiction of the Regional District of Nanaimo for fire protection via a contract that was held with the North Oyster Fire Department. The fire department also had many lectures and guest speakers with topics such as aircraft disaster, meth lab lecture, lung function lecture as well as guest speakers from forestry and motivational speakers covering a wide range of topics.

Additional training sessions held outside of Tuesday nights accounted for 798 man hours. This training was for first responder level three, air brake endorsement, aircraft emergency response, CPR level C, Live Fire levels one and two, marine water rescue and an airport exercise.

The training for 2010 is expected to be another busy year for the fire department. Training courses already scheduled include marine rescue tech level and low slope rope rescue. The fire department currently has 35 active members and brings on new recruits twice a year. New recruits participate in extensive training before they become active on first responder and fire suppression calls.

It’s that time of year where there are many residents burning their wood stoves. The fire department wishes to remind all residents to regularly inspect their smoke alarms to ensure they are working properly. We would also like to remind residents to only burn permissible materials in their woodstoves as they do with outside burning so as to not create noxious odors and thick black smoke which impacts other residents within the area. The Fire Department wishes to extend a very happy and safe new year to all the residents in the district.

Scout Bottle Drive

A bottle drive will be held on Saturday January 16th, 2010 by the First Cedar Scouts. Bottles will be picked up as well as residents may drop off bottles at the fire hall on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 ONLY. Drop off’s are greatly appreciated as it is not possible to reach the entire area for pickup. Due to the fantastic support by residents for the bottle drives our group is able to do many fun events and we now have one of the largest groups on Vancouver Island with Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, Ventures and Rovers actively participating in the Scouting movement. Thank you to all the Cedar residents for the continued support of scouting in Cedar, we are truly grateful.