Writing in this paper in 1999, Brent Fox said that as well as continual tidal action, dyke owners around the Minas Basin had to contend with a series of large storms that come every 18 years.

Fox dubbed this the Seros cycle, of which the most famous is the Saxby Gale of 1868.

The sea has the upper hand, Fox concluded, and nowhere is this more obvious than the shoreline around the Minas Basin. The Wellington Dyke, which was completed in 1812, protects some 1226 hectares of prime farmland. If Wellington Dyke ever should break, not only this rich farmland but entire communities along the Canard River would cease to exist overnight.

Today the Canard River is a placid stream originating in wetlands immediately west of Steam Mill and north of Upper Dyke.

But in 1685, when several Acadian families moved from Port Royal to the Canard area, the daily tides in the river peaked above Steam Mill. Areas we know today as Canard, Upper and Lower Canard, Chipman Corner, Upper Dyke and Steam Mill were flooded twice daily and at times the dykes must have resembled inland lakes.

Going back to Brent Fox again: He concluded in one of his studies that the Acadians first dyked the Canard River in Steam Mill, about where the railway placed a trestle bridge circa 1890. The stream running under the highway by the Newcombe Branch road in Upper Dyke was dyked early as well; all of which indicates how much of the Canard dykes were flood plains when the Acadians arrived

In 2006, I interviewed Stephen Hawboldt, then the executive director of the Clean Annapolis River Project (CARP), on the state of the Canard River. With the Coastal Protection Act in the news lately and the concern about rising tide levels, Humboldt’s observations on the vulnerability of the Wellington Dyke and the Canard dykes seem prescient.

The Canard dykes are “literally ripe for disaster,” Hawboldt said. “Sea levels in the Bay of Fundy are still rising and have been since time immemorial and with climatic changes this increase will be accelerated.” Hawboldt noted as well that land on the inside of Wellington Dyke is “tipped down” and any combination of tides, gale winds and higher sea levels will prove disastrous. Think Saxby Gale with this combination, and you get the picture.

Writing in a recent issue of the Chronicle-Herald, columnist John DeMont summed up factors that could prove disastrous in the Canard area and along much of Nova Scotia’s coastline. “The weather at the same time has gotten more violent and unpredictable,” DeMont wrote. “Oceans are rising, shorelines eroding.”

Summing up the obvious, the dykelands along Minas Basin, in Kings and Hants County, are too precious a resource to ignore and could be lost. If we ever needed the Coastal Protection Act proclaimed, we need it now.

Amen.