Esquimalt — The Place of Shitty Waters?
The CRD keeps finding sewage indicators and High-rated storm drains beside Esquimalt’s shoreline. At this pace, “When can we swim?” begins to sound like “Never.”
“The Place of Shitty Waters” is a deliberately blunt description of what we are allowing to happen around Esquimalt. It is not a translation of Esquimalt and is not presented as an Indigenous place-name.
Picture a family walking down to the water on a warm summer day. The children are carrying towels. Someone has brought a paddleboard. The water looks inviting, and from the beach there is no obvious sign that anything is wrong.
Now look a little closer.
At Kinver, two storm drains beside beach access have been rated High for Public Health Concern for three consecutive years. At Sturdee, another High-rated drain sits about seven metres from beach-access stairs. Around the same shoreline system, the Capital Regional District has recorded sewer odour, murky water, macerated paper, biofilm, bacterial mats and extraordinary concentrations of E. coli coming from stormwater discharges.
None of that is visible from a postcard.
It is buried in the technical appendices of the CRD’s 2025 Core Area Stormwater Quality Program Report, published in 2026. The report identifies six Esquimalt stormwater discharges as High for Public Health Concern:
744B, 781, 805, 806, 812 and 814.
Those six pipe numbers tell the real story of Esquimalt’s shoreline. Not the plans, promises, studies or council presentations—the water still coming out of the pipes. The CRD confirms that this is its current 2025 Core Area report.
What Does “High” Mean?
CRD’s High rating is a prioritization tool. It is not a beach-closure order, and it does not mean every litre of water around Esquimalt is unsafe at every hour of every day. CRD expressly says the system is not a complete human-health risk assessment.
That qualification matters, but it should not be used to make the findings sound harmless.
CRD combines the bacterial condition of a discharge with the way people use the shoreline nearby. In plain language, it asks two sensible questions: what is coming out of the pipe, and are people likely to come into contact with the receiving water?
The ratings are meant to identify which discharges deserve the greatest attention. When a drain remains High year after year, produces sewage indicators during dry weather and sits beside a place where people enter the water, it is doing exactly what a warning system is supposed to do: telling government where to act.
Esquimalt’s annual number of High-rated discharges from 2011 through 2025 was:
7, 7, 8, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5, 4, 3, 4, 5, 5 and 6.
Those figures are counts, not a controlled prevalence rate, because the number of sites sampled can vary. Even with that caution, the recent direction is difficult to celebrate. Esquimalt went from seven High-rated discharges in 2011 to three in 2021, then climbed back to six in 2025.
Every Esquimalt discharge rated High in 2024 remained High in 2025. Discharge 812 returned to High.
CRD can legitimately report that long-term work has produced regional improvements. Where a source has been found and fixed, that success should be acknowledged. But a regional improvement cannot erase the Esquimalt result sitting underneath it.
Six High-rated Esquimalt discharges remained in 2025.
Follow the Shoreline
The best way to understand the report is not to stare at a spreadsheet. It is to follow the discharges along the shoreline and read what CRD actually found.
Start with 744B at Gorge Creek.
This is not a story in which absolutely nothing was done. Esquimalt found and repaired a source, replaced pipe and relined sections in 2023. CRD deserves credit for recording that work, and Esquimalt deserves credit for completing it.
But the report also says:
“Ongoing; Esquimalt fixed a source, replaced and relined sections of pipe in 2023; other sources exist.”
Those final words matter: other sources exist.
On July 29, 2025, CRD sampled 744B during dry weather. There had been no rain. Staff recorded sewer odour, murky water and biofilm. The sample contained 420,000 E. coli colony-forming units per 100 millilitres—the standard laboratory measure used to report bacterial concentrations.
That result alone does not identify the exact source. It does not by itself prove that raw sewage was flowing from the pipe, nor does it establish an environmental offence. But CRD itself says other sources remain.
The honest public message is therefore not, “Gorge Creek was fixed.”
It is: “One source was fixed. The remaining sources still have to be found and stopped.”
That distinction is the difference between progress and completion.
From Gorge Creek, move to discharge 781 at West Bay.
On July 30, 2025, again with no rain, CRD recorded sewer odour, murky water and macerated paper. The E. coli concentration was 9,400 per 100 mL.
CRD did not declare that observation to be confirmed raw sewage, and neither should we. But sewer odour and macerated paper appearing in a stormwater discharge during dry weather are obvious sewage indicators requiring source tracing.
Where are they coming from? Has the source been found? Has it been repaired? Did follow-up sampling prove that the repair worked?
Those are not unreasonable questions. They are the whole purpose of monitoring.
Continue to 805 and 806 at Kinver, and the public-health concern becomes even harder to ignore.
Both drains were rated High in 2023, High in 2024 and High again in 2025. Both are immediately beside beach access. CRD assigns each drain a bacterial rating of 3 and a shoreline-use rating of 3, producing the maximum combined priority score of 6.
A shoreline-use rating of 3 refers to primary-contact recreation, including activities such as swimming and scuba diving.
These are not pipes hidden beneath an inaccessible industrial wharf. They are discharges beside places where people approach and enter the water.
At drain 805, CRD has repeatedly documented sewer odour, masticated paper or biofilm. In dry weather in 2024, the E. coli concentration reached 390,000 per 100 mL. In 2025, it reached 530,000 per 100 mL.
Drain 806 has also shown repeated dry-weather sewer odour and elevated bacteria. It carries an additional concern: 806 is on CRD’s Chemical Corrective Action List.
Before governments advertise a future of increasingly active and swimmable urban waterfront, surely the first obligation is to identify and eliminate the sources feeding persistently High-rated discharges beside beach access.
The story continues at 812 at Sturdee.
That discharge was High in 2023, fell to Moderate in 2024 and returned to High in 2025. CRD places it approximately seven metres east of beach-access stairs. Its recent record includes sewer odour, an E. coli result of 12,000 per 100 mL during dry weather in 2024, and 9,800 per 100 mL in January 2025.
This is not a newly discovered pipe. It is a known discharge that improved enough to drop one category and then returned to High.
The obvious question is why.
Finally, there is 814 at Grafton.
It was Moderate in 2023, High in 2024 and High again in 2025. CRD identifies an SPSO connection and a new source requiring investigation.
SPSO means sewage pump station overflow, but that label must be interpreted carefully. It does not mean every sample taken at that drain was collected during an active overflow.
On January 19, 2026, however, CRD collected a dry-weather sample and recorded sewer odour, murky water and a grey bacterial mat. The E. coli concentration was 960,000 per 100 mL.
The observed flow was low—about one litre per minute. That means the figure describes an extraordinary bacterial concentration at low flow, not an estimate of total sewage volume or total pollutant loading.
The low flow does not make the result meaningless. It tells investigators how to interpret it.
A stormwater discharge producing sewer odour, murky water, a bacterial mat and that concentration of E. coli during dry weather is not a file to leave sitting on a desk. It is a source to find.
Bacteria Are Only Part of the Story
E. coli receives attention because the public immediately understands why fecal contamination may be dangerous. But stormwater is not simply rainwater with bacteria in it. It can carry mixtures of contaminants washed from roads, parking lots, commercial properties, industrial lands, roofs, yards and failing infrastructure.
CRD’s current Chemical Corrective Action List includes three Esquimalt drains: 742, 749 and 806.
There are 14 Core Area corrective-action drains in total, meaning Esquimalt accounts for three of them—about 21 per cent.
CRD reports that the source at 749 has been narrowed down, that Esquimalt has been contacted and that resampling is required after action is taken. At 806, CRD has narrowed the source area to within approximately two blocks and calls for the discharge to be resampled.
CRD also makes a regional observation that should concern every council: most of the remaining corrective-action drains have been concerns for more than ten years.
A child beginning kindergarten when one of those problems was already known could now be attending high school.
That is how an environmental failure becomes an inheritance.
A Water Sample Is a Snapshot, Not a Movie
There is another limitation the public needs to understand. Each individual water sample is a snapshot.
It tells us what was captured at a particular location, at a particular time, under a particular set of conditions. That snapshot may catch a serious contamination event. It may also miss one by an hour, a day or a rainfall.
Stormwater changes constantly. The first runoff after a dry period can carry a concentrated wash of material from roads and paved surfaces. Traffic-related contaminants may rise during rainfall. A cross-connected sanitary line may create a stronger signal in dry weather. An intermittent business discharge may not be flowing when the technician arrives. Tides can influence coastal pipes. Flow can change rapidly over the course of one storm.
A snapshot is useful, but it is not the whole film.
That makes some of CRD’s existing results more concerning, not less. The program has already captured concentrations of 420,000, 530,000 and 960,000 E. coli per 100 mL through individual sampling events. It has recorded dry-weather sewer odours, paper, biofilm and bacterial mats.
What happened between those visits?
What came out during the first heavy rainfall after a long dry period?
What was missed because the discharge began after the sampling crew left?
What would continuous or storm-triggered monitoring show?
The honest answer is that we do not know.
It would be scientifically irresponsible to declare in advance that better monitoring would find worse results everywhere. It may identify higher peaks at some drains, different contaminants at others and periods of relatively clean discharge elsewhere.
Every one of those findings would be useful. Source control depends on knowing when contamination appears, what is present and where it originates.
The problem is not that CRD’s current samples are worthless. They are valuable warnings. The problem is treating a warning system as though it were a complete investigation.
CRD’s own work at Douglas Creek proves the importance of looking beyond occasional routine sampling. There, CRD used repeated seasonal sampling, additional parameters, benthic assessment and its first sampling for 6PPD-quinone, a highly toxic tire-wear transformation product affecting some salmonids.
CRD collected eight 6PPD-Q samples. Three exceeded the applicable guideline, and every exceedance occurred during rainfall.
Had those rainfall conditions not been sampled, those exceedances could have been missed.
That is the lesson hiding in CRD’s own report: when you sample can determine what you find.
Look Across the Salish Sea
We do not need to invent an entirely new monitoring model. Across the Salish Sea, Washington State has built a broader regional approach.
Washington’s Stormwater Action Monitoring program, known as SAM, pools resources from more than 100 cities and counties, the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, the state transportation department and other partners. Its purpose is not simply to count samples. It is to measure stormwater impacts, evaluate whether management practices work and produce information that leads to better decisions.
Its small-stream monitoring combines water chemistry, sediment chemistry, habitat information and biological indicators such as benthic macroinvertebrates. Streamflow and temperature are monitored continuously at study sites. That begins to answer not only what was in one bottle, but what is happening to the receiving creek over time.
Its nearshore program examines marine sediment and uses caged native mussels to assess pollutants in the receiving environment. Mussels filter water over time and can reveal exposure that a single water sample may miss.
Washington also has formal guidance for automatic stormwater samplers. These instruments can be connected to flow meters, rain gauges and probes, and can collect composite samples representing a larger portion of a storm rather than one bottle filled at one moment. Automatic samplers have limitations—they do not replace every form of field sampling—but they greatly expand the monitoring toolbox.
That does not mean every pipe in Puget Sound receives every test imaginable. Nor should every small Esquimalt drain be tested for hundreds of substances every week.
The principle is much simpler: use the right tool for the question.
Use individual samples for screening.
Use automatic and composite sampling when timing across a storm matters.
Measure flow when concentration alone cannot describe the total contaminant load.
Examine sediment when pollutants accumulate on the bottom.
Use mussels or other biological monitoring when the question becomes what organisms are actually exposed to over time.
Apply the heavier investigation to the catchments that existing evidence already identifies as persistent and high priority.
CRD’s routine program tells us where to start. A more modern investigation can help explain what the snapshots are missing.
What Else Might Be in the Runoff?
Bacteria are not the outer limit of modern stormwater science.
Depending on the land uses within a catchment, urban runoff may carry metals, petroleum hydrocarbons, PAHs, tire-wear chemicals, pesticides and other organic contaminants. Modern investigations may also consider PFAS, pharmaceuticals, personal-care compounds and endocrine-active substances where the site history and likely sources justify doing so.
That is not a claim that every one of those contaminants is present at every Esquimalt outfall.
We do not know that.
The absence of a test result, however, is not proof that a substance is absent. It means it was not measured through that particular analysis.
The solution is not an indiscriminate laboratory shopping list. It is targeted investigation based on the drainage area, land use, earlier findings and receiving environment.
Persistent High-rated discharges beside recreational shoreline should be among the first places where that broader approach is considered.
The Great Stormwater Shell Game
This is where the public conversation has repeatedly gone wrong.
A council receives a report. A consultant is hired. A source investigation begins. A section of pipe is relined. Staff return the following year with more monitoring results. Regional statistics improve. Each activity can be legitimate, and some represent real progress.
But the public is often left with the impression that a problem is “being dealt with” when the discharge remains High and the source remains unresolved.
That is the stormwater shell game.
It does not require a secret conspiracy. It works through the repeated substitution of activity for outcome.
The study becomes the accomplishment.
The plan becomes the accomplishment.
The investigation becomes the accomplishment.
The partial repair becomes the accomplishment.
Meanwhile, the one question that matters disappears beneath the paperwork:
Did the contamination stop?
CRD states that municipal storm-drain systems are owned and operated by the municipalities and that municipalities are responsible for remedial measures where possible.
CRD can identify the problem, sample the discharge, help narrow down a source and place it on a corrective-action list. Eventually, however, somebody must eliminate the cross-connection, repair the failed infrastructure, stop the improper discharge or otherwise prevent the contaminant from reaching the receiving water.
For these municipal systems, that responsibility does not disappear into the regional report.
CRD can point to the sick pipe. Esquimalt has to help make it well.
Councils appear much more comfortable discussing monitoring programs, engineering work and future plans than saying the plain-English version aloud.
Perhaps that is because plain English leads to expensive questions.
Aging infrastructure costs money. Cross-connections may involve private property. Businesses may have to change their practices. Homeowners may face plumbing repairs. Long-deferred municipal work may require substantial public investment.
Those conversations are politically uncomfortable.
But political discomfort cannot be the standard for environmental protection.
If one source was fixed, tell residents one source was fixed.
If other sources remain, tell them other sources remain.
If nobody yet knows where contamination is coming from, say so.
If a drain is still High, say it is still High.
If CRD recorded sewer odour and paper in dry weather, do not bury that fact in an appendix and expect an ordinary resident to find it.
Explain what it means, explain what remains uncertain and explain what happens next.
The public can handle an honest answer. What it should not be asked to accept is partial progress presented as completion.
When Do We Get to Swim?
Esquimalt should have an extraordinary urban waterfront.
Children should grow up swimming, paddling, fishing and turning over rocks to look for crabs. Families should be able to walk down beach-access stairs thinking about the tide and the temperature of the water—not the identification number of the nearest storm drain.
The CRD report does not say that every beach around Esquimalt is unsafe at all times. Its High rating is not a universal swimming prohibition. People already swim, dive, kayak and paddle in these waters.
The harder question is whether government can honestly promise reliably swimmable water while known High-priority discharges beside shoreline access remain unresolved.
At Kinver, 805 and 806 have been High for three consecutive years.
At Sturdee, a drain seven metres from beach stairs returned to High.
At Gorge Creek, CRD says other sources remain after a repair.
At West Bay, staff recorded sewer odour and macerated paper during dry weather.
At Grafton, CRD recorded sewer odour, murky water, a grey bacterial mat and 960,000 E. coli per 100 mL at low flow.
Against that record, “When will these waters be reliably swimmable?” is not a question government can answer with another general promise.
At the current pace, “never” becomes a reasonable public fear, even if it is not a scientific prediction.
We are not asking government to guarantee that natural waters will contain no bacteria, no wildlife waste and no risk under every condition. That would be impossible.
We are asking something much more basic:
Stop known preventable contamination from municipal stormwater systems before inviting another generation into the receiving water.
How Many Generations Need the Same Report?
This may be the most offensive part of the story.
People who first raised concerns about urban drainage and shoreline contamination decades ago are now grandparents. Their children grew up while the investigations and annual reports continued. Another generation is now arriving.
Are we going to hand those children the same pipe numbers?
Will someone stand before council in 2046 and explain that the source at 805 is still under investigation?
Will a consultant recommend additional sampling at 806?
Will another report note that 744B improved after one repair but that other sources remain?
Will another councillor explain that old infrastructure is complicated?
Previous generations could truthfully say they did not possess all the knowledge or technology available today.
We cannot.
We understand cross-connections, contaminated sediment, cumulative pollution and food-web exposure. We know that contamination does not disappear simply because a pipe empties into salt water. We have cameras, dye testing, GIS, flow meters, automatic samplers, continuous sensors, chemical fingerprinting, modern laboratories and biological monitoring.
What excuse are we preparing to leave our grandchildren?
There is something disgraceful about knowingly passing a preventable pollution problem forward while continuing to describe the process as management.
A monitoring program should eventually produce fewer contaminated discharges—not merely a longer record of the same ones.
What Has to Happen Now
CRD’s existing program should continue. It has produced decades of valuable evidence and has identified the priority locations.
But persistent problem catchments need more than periodic snapshots.
At selected High-rated drains, CRD and Esquimalt should use rainfall-event and first-flush sampling where appropriate, automatic or composite sampling over storm periods, continuous flow measurements, a contaminant suite tailored to catchment land use, and receiving-environment investigation involving sediment or biological monitoring where the evidence warrants it.
That stronger monitoring must not become another destination in itself. Its purpose is to make source control faster and more certain.
At 744B, one source was fixed; find the others.
At 781, trace the dry-weather sewage indicators upstream.
At 805 and 806, treat persistent High-rated discharges beside primary-contact shoreline with the urgency that their maximum priority scores demand.
At 812, determine why the discharge returned to High.
At 814, investigate the newly identified source and determine the relationship, if any, to sewage-pump-station infrastructure.
At chemical corrective-action drains 742, 749 and 806, complete the source-control work and resample to demonstrate whether it succeeded.
Do not close a file because a consultant finished a report.
Do not close it because a section of pipe was replaced.
Do not close it because one later sample improved.
Close it when the source has been eliminated and follow-up monitoring shows that the discharge has materially improved.
That is a result the public can understand.
Source Control Comes Before Restoration
We can restore shorelines, plant eelgrass, rebuild kelp habitat, improve fish habitat, create parks and promote swimming. All of that has value.
But restoration without source control reverses the proper order.
There is little sense spending public money repairing habitat while contaminated runoff continues entering the same receiving environment. There is little sense creating better beach access beside a persistently High-rated drain. There is little sense inviting more people into the water while the sources feeding that drain remain unresolved.
The sequence should be obvious:
Find the pollution. Trace it. Stop it. Prove it stopped. Then repair the damage.
CRD has already given us the starting point. It has identified six High-rated Esquimalt discharges, documented sewage indicators during dry weather, marked drains beside recreational shoreline, maintained a chemical Corrective Action List and shown through Douglas Creek why rainfall-event monitoring matters.
We do not need another generation to discover that pollution is coming out of storm drains.
We need this generation to finish the job.
Our grandchildren should not be reading a 2046 report explaining why the same sources were complicated, expensive or politically uncomfortable. They should be walking down those beach stairs, jumping into the water and complaining about only one thing:
How bloody cold it is.
By then, “The Place of Shitty Waters” should sound like an outrageous description from a past generation that finally came to its senses.
Not the name of the inheritance we left behind.
Technical References
1. Capital Regional District. 2025 Core Area Stormwater Quality Program Report. Published in 2026. Current Esquimalt public-health-priority ratings, outfall observations, Chemical Corrective Action List, Douglas Creek investigation and rating methodology. The Esquimalt findings used in this article were extracted and checked in the project evidence handoff.
2. Washington State Department of Ecology. Stormwater Action Monitoring. Regional pooled monitoring program supported by more than 100 Washington cities and counties, major ports, transportation authorities and other partners.
3. Washington State Department of Ecology. Puget Small Streams Study. Water and sediment chemistry, habitat and biological monitoring, with continuous streamflow and temperature measurements.
4. Washington State Department of Ecology. Puget Sound Nearshore Monitoring. Marine-sediment investigation and caged native mussels used to assess chemical contamination and exposure over time.
5. Washington State Department of Ecology. Automatic Sampling for Stormwater Monitoring. Guidance on automatic samplers, composite sampling and integration with flow meters, rain gauges and environmental probes.
Reading the Evidence Correctly
CRD’s High for Public Health Concern classification is a priority rating. It is not a complete health-risk assessment or a declaration that an entire beach is unsafe at every time.
Sewer odour, paper, biofilm, bacterial mats and elevated E. coli are important evidence supporting investigation and source tracing. Individually, they do not prove the precise source of contamination or establish a statutory offence.
Individual water samples are snapshots. That is why persistent High-priority catchments require strategically timed and more comprehensive monitoring—not to create a larger pile of data, but to identify the source and stop it.
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