Hope grows for cleaner Cootes Paradise as City of Hamilton pledges change in watershed plan [Video]

For a couple of months last spring, Hamilton’s Cootes Paradise Marsh offered a glimpse of what’s possible. 

The typically murky water was clear. 

“It’s a bizarre thought — you could see the bottom, enjoy the bottom, which was a first in [most] people’s lifetime,” said Tys Theysmeyer, a senior director with the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG), a charitable organization that manages the marsh. 

“You would’ve been confused as to where you were because it was so nice.” 

But after heavy rain in July, the westernmost tip of Lake Ontario reverted to its usual murky state that is not exactly good, but better than the decades before, Theysmeyer told CBC Hamilton in an interview this month.

The rain caused Chedoke Creek’s sewage tanks to overflow into Cootes Paradise, while sediment and rubble poured in from eroding and flooding escarpment creeks. 

The extreme weather event demonstrated how, despite the RBG’s decades-long attempts to clean up Cootes Paradise, it …