A story of two ponds, an old wooden drain, a school built over a vanished landscape, thirty years of community work, and pollution that kept finding its way to the Gorge
Stand at the mouth of Gorge Creek today and it looks almost peaceful.
A narrow channel winds through Esquimalt Gorge Park. Native plants lean over the water. Ducks work the shallows. The creek passes beneath a footbridge and enters the Gorge Waterway, where the tides carry its water east toward Victoria Harbour and west toward Portage Inlet.
It looks like a small creek in a pleasant park.
But the creek visible today is only the last few metres of a much larger story.
Official maps now call it Gorge Creek. In the records and memories of Veins of Life Watershed Society, part of the older system was known as Chan Creek. Its watershed once included a small creek and two ponds. It later became a network of filled ground, playing fields, roads, homes, commercial properties, storm drains and sewer pipes.
The creek was altered, buried and renamed.
The water never forgot the route downhill.
Before the school, the golf course and the streets
An 1854 map of the Districts of Victoria and Esquimalt shows a landscape that would be almost unrecognizable today.
There was no Esquimalt High School, no playing field, no Devonshire industrial area and no modern network of underground pipes. The map shows small natural drainage lines and two ponded areas within the broader landscape that later became the Gorge Creek watershed.
Those ponds were not ornamental features built beside a subdivision. They were part of the way water moved naturally through the land.
Rain collected in low ground. Wetlands slowed it down. Pond plants trapped sediment. Water seeped into the soil, moved through the creek and eventually reached the Gorge.
The modern CRD catchment map tells the other half of the story. It places Esquimalt High School and its playing fields inside a Gorge Creek drainage basin of roughly 218 hectares. The catchment stretches from the school and industrial lands, across residential neighbourhoods and the Gorge Vale Golf Course, to the creek mouth in Gorge Park. The map classifies about 34.9 per cent of the watershed as impervious surface—roads, roofs, paved yards, parking lots and other hard surfaces that send rain rapidly into drains rather than allowing it to soak into the earth.
Lay the old and new maps beside one another and the transformation becomes clear.
A creek-and-pond landscape became an urban plumbing system.
The pond beneath the school story
A former Esquimalt councillor, Lynda Hundleby is a long-serving Councillor for the Township of Esquimalt, once described the area where Esquimalt High School would later stand.
She had lived nearby when she was young. She remembered skating on the pond in winter. Looking down through the ice and water, she could see garbage lying beneath her.
Years later, she also witnessed work during development of the school property. Debris was excavated from the old pond area. Some of it was removed. The remaining material, as she remembered it, was covered and capped.
That account stayed with Veins of Life Watershed Society because it connected local memory with the buried geography shown on the old map.
VOLWS correspondence later described two small ponds and a creek in the school area, with the low ground receiving discarded material over many years. The old watercourse was gradually absorbed into roads, fill, development and drainage works.
The modern maps show why that history still matters.
The school property is not on some distant hill outside the watershed. It sits inside the Gorge Creek catchment. Stormwater lines cross and border the school lands. Drainage from the school, playing field, Devonshire Road and Cave Street area joins the wider stormwater system leading toward Gorge Creek.
The pond may be gone from view, but rainfall still falls on the same ground.
Chan Creek enters a wooden box
The lower part of Chan Creek was also transformed.
VOLWS’s historic project records identify CRD discharge 0745 as the old outlet where Chan Creek entered the Gorge Park area through a wooden box pipe.
It was exactly what it sounds like: a constructed wooden conduit carrying water through altered ground toward the Gorge.
That outlet can be seen on the CRD stormwater mapping inside the park, west of the present lower Gorge Creek channel. The wooden box pipe belonged to an earlier arrangement of the watershed, before later creek realignment and restoration work changed the visible route.
By then, the natural system had become a mixture of creek, ditch, culvert, wooden conduit and municipal storm sewer.
The water arriving at the park was no longer simply rain flowing over forest soil. It was runoff collected from developed land.
That meant anything entering a catch basin upstream could eventually appear beside the footbridge and in the Gorge Waterway.
Oil.
Sewage.
Industrial wastewater.
Road sediment.
Metals.
Fecal contamination.
The creek had become the final open section of a much larger underground system.
A park built around the water
Long before the creek became known mainly for spills and sewage investigations, the Gorge was one of the region’s great recreational destinations.
BC Electric opened Gorge Park in 1905. People travelled there by streetcar to picnic, boat, swim and visit the Japanese Tea Gardens. Historical photographs show bathing beaches, bathhouses, boating events and crowds gathered along the water. The park was a major public attraction, not a forgotten strip of land behind an industrial area. (Online Academic Community)
The Japanese Gardens later became entangled in one of the ugliest parts of Canadian history. The gardens were lost during the period when Japanese Canadians were dispossessed and forcibly removed during the Second World War.
The park continued under municipal ownership and was later known for many years as Gorge Kinsmen Park.
Esquimalt’s archives preserve a remarkable pair of photographs from 1968. One shows four boys watching as the Gorge Park pool was being filled. Another, dated August 1, 1968, shows swimmers and lifeguards at the Kinsmen/Gorge Park Pool. The second photograph was later used in an April 26, 1972 Daily Colonist article. (Esquimalt Archives)
That pool was in the lower park area and should not be confused with the older pond near the school. But together they show how closely the community’s history was tied to water.
People skated on the upper pond.
They swam in the lower park.
They boated and bathed in the Gorge.
And all the while, the same watershed was being buried beneath development.
Scientists were warning about the Gorge by the 1960s
Concerns about the health of the Gorge are not new.
University of Victoria’s environmental archives contain a substantial body of work from the 1960s and early 1970s. Studies examined the ecology of Portage Inlet, the biology of the Gorge Waterway, oysters, eelgrass, herring, zooplankton, sediments and the effects of sewage enrichment.
The archive includes:
a 1965 study on the biological effects of damming the Gorge;
a 1966 ecological survey of Portage Inlet;
a 1968 brief on controlling Portage Inlet and the Gorge;
studies of native and introduced oysters;
sediment investigations; and
a five-volume 1972 synthesis of the biology and management of the Gorge Waterway system. (UVic Archives)
The 1972 work concluded that scientists already possessed considerable information about the basic structure of the ecosystem. It also identified enrichment—the loading of nutrients and organic waste—as a major biological problem.
The Gorge was being studied because the warning signs were already visible.
Waterways do not suddenly become polluted on the day someone takes a sample. Contamination accumulates through years of leaking systems, poor disposal practices and untreated runoff.
John, Wesley and the beginning of Veins of Life
In 1996, John Roe and his son Wesley began picking garbage from the Gorge Waterway.
It was simple at first: two people removing what they could reach.
Then other people joined.
Volunteers, students, businesses, divers, municipalities and senior governments became involved. Thousands of people took part over the years. The work grew from shoreline cleanups into a much wider effort involving abandoned vehicles and machinery, storm drains, industrial pollution, habitat restoration, education and source control.
The goal was ambitious:
Make the Gorge and Victoria Harbour swimmable by the year 2000.
A 2010 VOLWS history recalled that 44 stormwater outfalls had been listed as severely affected by fecal or chemical contamination. The cleanup could remove shopping carts, engine blocks, boats, pipes and garbage, but those visible objects were only part of the problem. Much of the pollution arrived invisibly through pipes.
By the late 1990s, VOLWS files included an Esquimalt dye-test project, Stream Team journals and storm-drain work. Dye testing allowed investigators to place a harmless coloured tracer into a drain or plumbing connection and then watch where it emerged.
A green or red plume appearing downstream could reveal what maps and assumptions had missed.
A sink connected to a storm pipe.
A sanitary line tied into the wrong system.
A private lateral leaking into a drain.
A pipe that crossed another pipe beneath a street.
The old VOLWS records show that this type of work was underway by 1998 and 1999—nearly two decades before the major 2017 Gorge Creek investigation.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada acknowledged the work in a March 2000 letter to Esquimalt. DFO described VOLWS efforts as including the removal of tons of garbage, marking and monitoring storm sewers, monitoring the Craigflower and Colquitz systems, public education and the development of stormwater best-management practices.
This was not simply a cleanup group collecting bottles from the beach.
It was a watershed organization learning how pollution travelled.
The 2005 restoration
Esquimalt restored the visible lower Gorge Creek channel in 2005.
The creek was brought back into public view, planted with native vegetation and incorporated into the park landscape. The municipality says the restored creek became habitat for native plants and wildfowl. The Gorge Waterway Nature House opened nearby in 2008. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
The physical restoration was valuable.
It replaced a buried or degraded section with an open channel. It created vegetation, shade, shallow water and habitat. It allowed visitors to see a creek where there had once been pipes, fill and altered ground.
But the restored channel remained connected to the same urban catchment.
A creek can be daylighted without the water becoming clean.
A planted stream can still carry sewage.
A natural-looking bank can still receive petroleum from a leaking tank.
A salmon-enhancement site can still sit downstream from cross-connections and contaminated runoff.
The beauty of the lower channel did not change what was entering the drains upstream.
The regional stormwater warning reaches Council
VOLWS continued to press the larger issue.
In 2010, the society worked with the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre on Re-Inventing Rainwater Management in the Capital Region.
Email records show that Esquimalt placed the report on its Council agenda and invited VOLWS to appear as a delegation on November 8, 2010. The original five-minute presentation time was expanded to twenty minutes.
The argument was straightforward.
Stormwater was being treated as a drainage problem—something to move away from roads and buildings as quickly as possible.
But once that runoff carried oil, sewage, metals, sediment and industrial chemicals into a creek, it became a water-quality and habitat problem.
The pipe solved flooding in one place by exporting contamination to another.
2015: kerosene travels through the system
On November 30, 2015, Esquimalt crews spotted a petrochemical spill on the Gorge Waterway near Sioux Place and Gorge Park.
Booms and absorbent material were deployed. The substance was later identified as kerosene. The Township traced it to the vicinity of Colville Road and Carrie Street and concluded that it had been illegally discharged into a manhole. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
The spill did not remain where it was poured.
It travelled through the drainage network and emerged at the creek.
Weeks later, crews were still finding traces of the kerosene-like substance between the containment boom at the creek mouth and the footbridge. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
The incident demonstrated the watershed in the bluntest possible way.
A manhole inland was connected to a bird sanctuary and tidal water.
2017: a creek that smelled like sewage
In July 2017, Gorge Creek entered one of the worst documented contamination episodes in its modern history.
The water was described as highly odorous, with a sewage-like smell. Esquimalt, Island Health, the CRD and the Province became involved.
The investigation moved through several explanations before a major source was finally identified.
Crews traced a significant wastewater cross-connection to the upper end of the stormwater collection system. Waste that should have entered the sanitary sewer had instead been directed into the storm drain leading to Gorge Creek. The Township repaired the connection, and monitoring showed a major decline in contamination. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
The later SNC-Lavalin report identified the location as 834 Devonshire Road. It described fermentation wastewater from a business at the property as a potential contributor to the extraordinarily high bacterial loading. The connection was repaired on September 28, 2017, and the flow was redirected to the sanitary sewer.
The report examined sampling from 33 locations across the Gorge Creek stormwater catchment between August and December 2017.
The results were astonishing.
Of 149 fecal-coliform samples, 137 exceeded the recreational-water guideline. The highest result was 52,000,000 colony-forming units per 100 millilitres.
Of 146 E. coli samples, 130 exceeded the guideline. The highest result was 48,000,000 CFU/100 mL.
Of 149 enterococci samples, 140 exceeded the guideline. The highest result was 37,120,000 CFU/100 mL.
The numbers before and after the repair show just how important the cross-connection was.
Before September 28, average fecal coliform was about 1.45 million CFU/100 mL. After the repair, it fell to roughly 76,000.
Average E. coli fell from approximately 803,000 to 32,440.
Average enterococci fell from about 1.24 million to 31,624.
That was a dramatic improvement.
It was not clean water.
The chemical results told their own story. A paired test for chemical oxygen demand measured 293 milligrams per litre upstream and 23,000 milligrams per litre downstream before the repair. The report also recorded pH values ranging from 4.1 to 9.98 and repeated sulphate exceedances.
SNC-Lavalin concluded that the repair improved conditions substantially, but elevated bacteria continued to occur. The report identified other likely contributors within the stormwater network, including leaking sanitary infrastructure, pet and wildlife waste, nutrient loading and other contamination sources.
One pipe had been corrected.
The watershed still had problems.
A treatment plan for the whole creek
In January 2018, VOLWS presented A Plan for Esquimalt.
The proposal grew out of work already undertaken at Cecelia Creek, where VOLWS and its partners had mapped industrial activities, visited businesses, examined stormwater pathways and promoted wet detention ponds, oil-water separation, vegetation and source control.
For Gorge–Chan Creek, the plan proposed:
further daylighting of the creek;
three bioremediation ponds;
up to three upstream Stormceptor-style treatment units;
a drainage-area program modelled on the Cecelia Creek work; and
an independent engineered environmental assessment.
The idea was to treat the watershed as a connected system.
Slowing the water would allow sediment to settle.
Vegetation could help capture nutrients and some pollutants.
Mechanical units could intercept oil, grit and floating material.
Business and property inspections could reduce what entered the pipes in the first place.
The proposal was not about hiding the outlet.
It was about reducing the contamination before the water reached the park.
2020: oil rises from the ground
In January 2020, another hydrocarbon spill appeared in Gorge Creek.
At first, the substance was uncertain. It could have been kerosene, heating fuel or another petroleum product. Crews placed booms in the creek and along the estuary while investigating the surrounding drainage area. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
A leaking home heating-oil tank was eventually identified as a main source.
Oil had escaped into the soil, entered surrounding drainage pipes and emerged in Gorge Creek, the estuary and the Gorge Waterway. Cleanup, staff, consulting and related costs quickly exceeded $50,000. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
The scale of the investigation showed the true size of the system. Esquimalt examined about 222 hectares of land and 19 kilometres of pipe while tracing the contamination. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
Rainfall complicated everything.
Heavy rain and snowmelt moved pollutants through soil and drainage systems. Tides pushed water back and forth through the estuary. Material that had settled in pipes or along banks could be flushed out again.
At the same time, a major storm overwhelmed pump stations and caused discharges to outfall areas including the Gorge Waterway. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
The creek was not simply receiving what happened that morning.
It was receiving what had accumulated across the watershed.
More dye, more oil and more evidence
In 2021, Esquimalt again used tracing dye while investigating underground drainage in the Gosper Crescent area.
The method was the modern continuation of the same practical work VOLWS had been doing in the 1990s: put a visible marker into the system, follow the route and find where the wrong water is going.
In March 2022, a member of the public reported another oil sheen near an outfall by Craigflower Road. Crews placed booms along Gorge Creek and investigated the municipal drain network. (Corporation of the Township of Esquimalt)
Habitat work was also taking place in the creek delta.
The intention was positive: improve the estuary for salmon and other wildlife.
Yet the history of Gorge Creek shows the tension that follows almost every urban restoration project.
The creek mouth can be planted in a season.
The upstream drainage system may take decades to repair.
The modern stormwater picture
The CRD’s more recent records show that bacterial and chemical concerns remain scattered through the Gorge Creek drainage area.
In 2024, the main SW0744 flow produced E. coli results of 1,400 and 600 CFU/100 mL.
SW0744A produced 16,000 CFU/100 mL. The field note described murky water, a slight sewer odour and recent rain.
A 2023 SW0744B result reproduced in the current appendices was 12,000 CFU/100 mL.
CRD’s multi-year averages for samples collected since 2018 included:
SW0742: 744 CFU/100 mL;
SW0744: 844;
SW0744A: 2,095; and
SW0744B: 209,474.
The samples were collected at different times and under different conditions, but together they show a system that continued to receive substantial fecal contamination.
The records also describe chemical concerns.
Mercury was found at SW0742 at roughly five times the applicable guideline. Elevated zinc was found in sediment associated with SW0744. Other nearby Esquimalt discharges carried histories of copper, zinc, petroleum and PAHs.
CRD reported that a source associated with SW0744B was repaired and pipe sections were replaced or relined in 2023.
Another source remained.
The creek beneath the map
The history of Chan–Gorge Creek can be read in layers.
The first layer is the old landscape: a creek, wet ground and two ponds.
The second is the community memory: a councillor skating on one of those ponds and seeing garbage beneath the ice.
The third is development: debris excavated, material capped, the school and playing fields constructed, roads pushed through and drainage collected into pipes.
The fourth is the wooden box outlet at 0745, carrying the old creek through Gorge Park.
The fifth is the modern stormwater network, joining the school, Devonshire Road, Cave Street, industrial lands, homes, the golf course and the park.
Then come the incidents:
Kerosene in 2015.
Wastewater and fermentation effluent in 2017.
Heating oil in 2020.
Another oil sheen in 2022.
Persistent bacteria and metals in the years that followed.
And through all those layers runs one constant.
Water moves downhill.
Not just an Esquimalt story
Gorge Creek is a small watershed, but it empties into a much larger ecosystem.
The Gorge Waterway connects Portage Inlet with Victoria Harbour. Its shallow margins support insects, benthic organisms, birds and fish. Those organisms form part of the food web that supports forage fish, juvenile salmon and larger predators.
In 2000, Fisheries and Oceans Canada described the Gorge and Portage Inlet as historically supporting coho and chum salmon, coastal cutthroat trout, herring, smelt, flounders, perch, sculpins, pipefish, gobies, shellfish, plankton, eelgrass, birds and mammals.
The pathway can be followed from the smallest life in the mud:
Healthy sediment supports invertebrates.
Invertebrates and plankton support small fish.
Forage fish support salmon.
Chinook salmon support Southern Resident killer whales.
A contaminated creek is therefore never only about one pipe beside one park.
It is part of the Salish Sea.
The lesson Chan Creek kept teaching
Much good work has occurred here.
Volunteers removed tons of garbage.
Storm drains were marked and traced.
Businesses and residents were educated.
A buried creek was brought back into daylight.
Native plants returned.
Cross-connections were discovered and repaired.
Oil was contained.
Pipes were relined.
Habitat was rebuilt.
Each piece mattered.
But the history also shows why a creek cannot be restored only at its mouth.
A restored channel still receives whatever the watershed sends it.
A salt marsh cannot correct a sanitary cross-connection.
A planting project cannot stop heating oil travelling through a perimeter drain.
A new creek bed cannot remove metals already bound to sediment.
And a beautiful park cannot make a storm sewer harmless.
Chan Creek did not vanish when it was placed in a wooden box.
It did not vanish when its ponds were filled.
It did not vanish when the school, roads and playing fields were built.
It became hidden infrastructure.
Then, again and again, it revealed itself through coloured dye, sewer odour, oil sheen, laboratory results and water flowing out of the ground.
The creek has been telling the same story for generations:
The waterway begins far upstream from the water’s edge.
The pipe connects the source to the habitat.
And real restoration begins before the pollution enters the drain.
"The_Spill_Gorge_Chan_Creek_SNN_Lavelin_.pdf"
2025 Core Area Stormwater Quality Program Report.pdf [PDF/214.5MB]
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