Information Fluency Project

The Raw Sewage Crisis

By: Dylan Betts (Christian Serban as groupmate)

Our Sway:

Our Letter:

Dear Honourable George Heyman, 

This is a letter coming from two Riverside students named Dylan Betts and Christian Serban. -We are writing this letter to inform you on a problem with energy usage that we have recently discovered in a project relating to energy issues found in BC, and more specifically Vancouver. We did a lot of research and found the many negative effects that raw sewage can have on our environment and community. We also found ways that we can help remove the risks of the byproducts and use them for beneficial uses. The first articles we read on this subject were about how in past years cities around the coastlines of BC were dumping their raw, untreated, sewage directly into the ocean. This, of course, had a massive impact on the underwater wildlife, and even the residents of the communities, who entered the water. Many bacteria and microbes were floating in the waters, like E-Coli for example. We also read many articles about how cities like Victoria have invested many millions of dollars into building treatment facilities, to remove impurities from Raw sewage so that cleaner water can be put into the ocean, without the sludge. Another big investment for Vancouver and New Westminster is the Sapperton District Energy Project, which by using the heat found in the pipes, can heat entire buildings and water tanks. Although these tasks can be expensive, the government would save a lot of money over time. We hope you will consider this letter and think of how we can continue to benefit this country and province by making it a cleaner, smarter place. 

 

Sincerely, 

Dylan, and Christian 

 

My Personal Reflection:

1) What questions did you need to research to create your sway? 

In order to research information to create Christian and my sway, we had to go down many different rabbit holes of information. Whenever we began to research one question we had, it would lead to another, and another. This was beneficial to the project because later we would have had to research the same questions. An example of this was our biggest question: How is Raw Sewage impacting the ecosystem around Vancouver and British Columbia in general? We then found a highly informative article by Uytae Lee, which told us about how it was preventing the residents of Vancouver from entering the waters, because of the many bacteria like E-Coli which were contaminating the ocean. Although this was all the information we were looking for, Uytae went on to mention how Vancouver uses a merged pipeline system which mixes the rainwater with sewage, making it a hazard of flooding during storms. In later parts he mentioned many other interesting details which we learned more from and researched more. This led to more valuable information being found. To try to not overwhelm the reader, we eventually cut down a lot of the information, and simplified it, but we still gained a lot more information for ourselves. 

2) What new or familiar digital tools did you try to use as you worked through this project? 

Christian and I used Gale Search quite a few times to find information more relevant to BC. Although the search engine isn’t the strongest, and a lot of what comes up in a search is irrelevant, when we did find some informative articles, they had a lot of useful information that we used. More specifically, “Out of sight, out of mind” was an article which talked about how at the time of it being written (1995) both Vancouver and Victoria were dumping 100% of their raw sewage into the ocean. As the title mentions, at the time they were not even believing that they would be able to find a way to fix the issue, but now that we are in the current time, we have been able to see the progress made since then. I liked using Gale Search and some of the other websites linked to the Destiny Discover page because they helped me to find more hidden information and specify my searches like on the website where it made a bunch of colorful tiles of information to further narrow down to what I was looking for. Of course, we also used some familiar sites like CBC news, where we received some more general information, which was very important, and although not all of it was specific to Vancouver, there was a lot more information about how sewage is treated, the amounts of sewage created in Canada, and more. 

 

3) What was the process you used to investigate the topic and how did you verify and cite the information you found? 

Originally, we thought we were restricted to only gaining information from Destiny Discover, which was a slight issue since it meant that we had a challenging time accessing information for the first one or two nights. After that we found out that we were not solely restricted to that and so researched more on the internet on google. We usually would find an article we needed by searching cue words in our questions, and as mentioned before this would lead us down increasingly more rabbit holes. For the articles found on Gale Search, we used the “cite” button at the top, and the online websites we used a citation site (Citation Machine®: APA Format & APA Citation Generator) to help us. To verify that the information we received was true, we tried to use well-known sources like CBC, and CTV. 

4) How did the process of completing this challenge go? What could you have done better? 

I think the process of completing this assignment went relatively well. We had some technical difficulties at the start, not being able to access Destiny Discover and all, but after we got over that road bump, we completed this assignment fairly easily. We were interested in this subject ourselves, and even if this were not an assignment, I would still have wanted to do a bit of research into this subject, as it affects me and of course, the rest of the residents of Vancouver. I think the only way I could have done better in this assignment was if I had asked more questions, like how to format the sways in a better way, how to access the Destiny Discover on the first day, and just a few other difficulties I could have gone around if I asked a few more questions. Other than that, this was a good assignment to teach me how to research information in more ways than just “Googling” everything. 

 

 

Word document with all our research, links, and more: