Update: Fortress Ski Hill Should Not Truck Mountain Water to Calgary

August 6, 2019

Albertans have until August 10^th to write Statements of Concern to the Alberta government about Fortress ski hill’s water proposal. Fortress is seeking to remove and sell 50 million litres per year of water it does not need for its ski hill business, to be trucked to a Calgary water bottling facility. AWA believes that this water, which would otherwise flow into Kananaskis’ Galatea Creek, should remain in the mountain stream.

It’s important that decision makers and Fortress ski business hear from citizens about their opinion on this proposal.

AWA has confirmed with Alberta Environment and Parks that the ‘Statement of Concern’ deadline for citizens is August 10th, thirty days after Fortress’ public notice appeared in the Rocky Mountain Outlook newspaper.

AWA’s Statement of Concern to the Alberta government and Fortress can be found here.

Fortress has confirmed that this trucked bottled water will be marketed for its ‘purity’. Existing municipal water supplies are of very high quality, whereas this bottled water will actually be worse for the environment. Its higher impacts include:

removing water from a small mountain stream flowing into a protected area in the Bow River basin headwaters;
greenhouse gas emissions to pump and transport thousands of truckloads per year of water that is already flowing naturally to Calgary; and
helping to promote bottled/canned water as ‘purer’ than high quality municipal drinking water, when we need to greatly reduce our overall packaging and waste.

Please take a minute to send a letter citing Application number 003-00037369, and File number 12562 to:

Alberta’s water approvals office aep.waapplications@gov.ab.ca (the auto-reply at this e-mail is tailored to applicants, but this is the right address)
Minister of Alberta Environment and Parks, Hon. Jason Nixon, aep.minister@gov.ab.ca
Thomas Heath, Fortress Mountain Holdings Ltd., Thomas.heath@skifortress.com
your own MLA – their contact information is at http://www.assembly.ab.ca/net/index.aspx?p=mla_home

And we always appreciate if you copy AWA, in this case Carolyn Campbell at ccampbell@abwild.ca

Thanks for speaking up for our public water resources!