The Chair of the Ausable-Bayfield Maitland Valley Source Water Protection Committee says COVID-19 really shut down a lot of things they were hoping to do over the last two years.
But Matt Pearson says they were able to come up with a unique way of dealing with that. They decided to create a series of videos and the members of the committee were the stars of the videos.
“They were the stars of our videos and we created little scripts and we’d make a four or five minute video on a topic and have one of our committee members be a movie star and then we put these on the web site and we’ve done seven of them now and we’re working on our eighth.”
Pearson says the topics varied, but they addressed questions that people often ask, like what does it mean when you see a sign that says you’re entering a water protection region.
“We’d have someone from the committee explain that and show people different areas across our boundaries, not just Huron County, but the two watersheds. It was kind of neat, the committee members got engaged. We’ve put these up on our web site and we’ve had over twenty-thousand hits on them.”
“One of our members is a young lady who’s a water technician, so she takes people on a tour through the Seaforth water tower and plant and talks about how we protect water coming out of the ground. We’ve got another one in Goderich about spill prevention in the port, because the ports are really near the Goderich water in-take.”
Pearson says the water protection program was born out of the Walkerton tragedy, but he says that was a long time ago and a lot of people have forgotten about that or are too young to remember, so it’s important to remind people of what goes in to providing them with safe drinking water.
